Climbing Kilimanjaro at 70

Climbing Kilimanjaro at 70 by Wolfe, Richard A., Ph.d.. paperback edition. ISBN: 9781932158908.

Dick Wolfe is a nuclear engineer, a vintner and a dreamer who makes his dreams come true. Born in Sophia, West Virginia, the son of a coal miner who died of the effects of black lung, Dick Wolfe developed a passion for clean coal technology. Dr. Wolfe earned his BS at Virginia Tech in Chemical Engineering and PhD in Nuclear Engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He has spent over fifty years in the energy business: first working with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission on the energy supply system for the Apollo Moon Mission and secondly, working in nuclear waste management and clean coal technology with the US Department of Energy. He is the founder and president of his own clean coal technology company and recently patented a process to remove 100% of the mercury pollutants from coal. Dick Wolfe learned wine-making from Italian immigrants as a boy in West Virginia. He is a vintner who traveled the world to vineyards at the same altitude as his home in Banner Elk, North Carolina, (4000-5000 ft.) bringing back grape vines to create a wine industry in the high country of North Carolina. He established the first commercial winery in this region of the Appalachian Mountains, the Banner Elk Winery. At present, 35 vineyards owe their genesis to his work. This memoir touches on both these passions. However the focus is the fulfillment of a long-standing dream of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. Like his other passions, this one comes from boyhood experience. Wolfe was the projectionist in the small-town movie theater and, as a teenager in 1957, showed the movie The Snows of Kilimanjaro -- and watched it "about forty times."-- He vowed then, to "someday climb that mountain." Little did he realize that "someday" would be when he was seventy-years-old. Indeed, Dick Wolfe celebrated his 70th birthday on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, January 11, 2010 - on his way to the top.