Lori Yanuchi

Lori Yanuchi has raised and trained sled dogs for 22 years, first as a park ranger in Denali National Park, and later as a concessionaire, freighting mountain climbing gear to Mt. McKinley, tallest mountain in North America, by dogteam. Since writing ‘Big Dogs’ and ‘Ranger Trails’, she and husband Jeff have shared many adventures on the trail with twin sons Stony and Brooks. Brooks was diagnosed with autism at age three. Their family struggles, balancing Brook’s needs in a wilderness setting, was featured in the February 2006 issue of Backpacker magazine, in an article entitled, ‘Waterboy’.

Lori is now focused on non-fiction writing centered around her love of wilderness, winning two awards in 2014. Her essay, ‘Wilderness Mystique’, won Best Wilderness Story in a National Park Service contest, and her essay, ‘Che’, won first place in the Alaska Writer’s Guild non-fiction essay contest.

She is currently raising kids, training pups, growing vegetables, and running sled dogs a day’s mush north of Denali National Park. In all her free time, she is working on a memoir about transitioning from a ‘glamorous’ Miami lifestyle to the unadorned life of a backcountry ranger in the wilds of Alaska, after meeting her future husband in the Everglades.