True Alaska spirit found in creative solutions

Emilie Fetscher, 27, is representative of a gifted breed of people drawn north to America's last great wilderness.

A hundred years ago, most of them came in search of wealth. Now, the best of them come in search of adventure.

The end-of-the-roaders who flee their problems elsewhere and come north only to find new problems make the news with some regularity. The adventurers who come, linger and enrich the 49th state with their talents are less often noticed, though they far outnumber the end-of-the-roaders.

Fetscher got here by way of a ski lodge in Alta, Utah, with detours to Stanford University and Africa to try to make the world a better place.

In conversation, she is a geyser of ideas and enthusiasm.

Strangely enough, what she did at Stanford and in Africa has Alaskan written all over it.

Fetscher walks in the footsteps of Alaskans like the legendary Joe Delia of Skwentna or the late Joe Redington of Knik or dozens of others blessed with the ability to improvise solutions to basic engineering problems with only the materials at hand.

Every Alaskan who has spent much time in-country has come to understand the art and science of jury-rigging, which requires a creative and flexible mind.

Creative and flexible minds are a good thing. Quite possibly the greatest resource the state has is that it both attracts and breeds people so equipped.

In the increasingly global economy of today, and the certainly even more global economy of tomorrow, they are the future of the 49th state -- whether the minds belong to the marketers figuring out new ways to make the adventure tourism business provide jobs in rural Alaska, or the chemists trying to shift the effluent-treatment paradigm to make a project like the proposed Pebble mine work.

Personally, I'd like to see a lot of jobs provided by businesses that make money showing Outsiders how great the Alaska wilderness is.

But the reality is that some people aren't equipped for working with other people in such jobs.

We're not all as personable or as inherently people-friendly as Fetscher, or as creative -- which brings this back to how she is poised to help the Ethiopians and, possibly, make a buck in the process.

The good capitalists out there will get a chuckle at Fetscher and her study group from Stanford making money off some of the poorest people in the world.

The good socialists might heed what Fetscher has to say on the same subject:

People respect that which they have to buy or earn. If you simply give them things, they will neglect or abuse those things.

So Fetscher and the Mighty Mitad group want to sell Ethiopians a ring of steel that could save them much money.

A quick primer: The mitad is a clay plate on which women in Ethiopia and some other parts of Africa cook. Because it is clay, it is delicate and breaks regularly. Ethiopian women (the men don't cook) reportedly go through about four mitads a year. Each costs about $4, which seems like little until you consider these are people living on about a dollar per day. Unfortunately, because Ethiopians are mired in tradition, they are unwilling to replace the mitad with something more durable, say a Teflon-coated cooking pan.

So Stanford got involved in a venture to try to come up with a better way for cooking with the mitad. Fetscher said a lot of effort focused on how to build some sort of new stove to protect the mitad.

Needless to say, all such options were costly and complicated. Fetscher's group, in the best Alaska tradition, recognized the importance of KISS -- Keep It Simple Stupid.

Fetscher, whose undergraduate degree is in engineering, helped design a cheap, simple steel band that can be wrapped around the outside of the mitad and wrenched tight. The steel band puts the entire disc of clay under compression and strengthens it by orders of magnitude.

By reinforcing the mitad, Fetscher's group estimates Ethiopians could save $200 million a year in mitad replacement costs. She's hopeful they'll use the money to educate their children.

To that one can only observe it is obvious you can take the student out of Stanford, but you can't take Stanford out of the student.

Still, I'd love to have Emilie Fetscher around when my snowmachine breaks down in some new and unexpected way 100 miles from nowhere in the Alaska backcountry. A creative and flexible mind is a beautiful thing, and nowhere more so than in the Alaska Bush.

Outdoors editor Craig Medred is an opinion columnist. Find him online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.