KEEP CALM…MUSH, SEAN

Growing up in Tucker, Sean Underwood was a talented athlete even as a youngster. He played soccer in the Tucker Youth Soccer Association (TYSA) Triumph program, baseball and basketball in the Rehoboth Baptist Church youth sports program, and swam with Northumberland Swim Club. He started football in elementary school, but in high school at St. Pius X found tennis to be his favorite sport. His favorite sport, that is, until his global travels landed him in the Alaskan wilderness on the back of a dogsled.

Underwood has always exhibited a sense of adventure, inherited, his mother thinks, from his Chilean The family farm in Chile. grandfather, with whom he developed a close relationship as a child. All of his grandfather’s siblings lived in Chile, and during frequent visits to the family farm there, he also became close to his many aunts, uncles and cousins who lived in the country. When Underwood graduated from college in 2014, with a bachelor’s degree in economics and a minor in Spanish, he took a seasonal job in Costa Rica, then continued to travel south from there, finally ending back in Chile on the family farm. His grandfather had passed away while Underwood was in college but his extended family warmly welcomed him. “Living on the family farm for that few months was the closest thing to inner peace I had ever known,” Underwood remembers. “I liked the quiet, I liked being outside, and I learned a lot from my cousins and aunt and uncle that live there.”

Traveling through Chile and Argentina was expensive for a broke recent college graduate, but staying with various family members as he traveled helped with costs as well as gave him the opportunity to enhance his Spanish language skills. He explored the central third of Chile and hiked and camped in the Andes. As he bonded with his Chilean family, Underwood contemplated moving to the country for a longer residency but the visa process proved too complicated. He stayed with his family as long as he legally could before returning back to the states in 2015. Underwood’s restless spirit soon had him looking for a new adventure. He phoned an aunt and uncle who lived in Alaska, who bought him a one-way ticket to the state and hired him as a crewman with their commercial fishing business. He spent that entire summer set net fishing for sockeye salmon on the southern tip of Kodiak Island, where he lived off the grid with his aunt and uncle, caught his own food, and watched grizzlies walk through the backyard. Their closest neighbor was several miles away. Sean spent the summers of 2015 and 2016 in Alaska, and then decided to spend a winter there. Not knowing what he would do for work during the winter months, his cousins told him of their jobs working at a place with sled dogs. When they started talking about Iditarod, Underwood became interested, did some research and then contacted four-time Iditarod winner Jeff King for a job. King saw Underwood’s fishing experience and hired him because “he knew I could work long days and be ‘comfortable’ in poor weather conditions.” King also offered Underwood a place to stay and a monthly stipend for groceries. (The closest grocery store was over two hours north in Fairbanks.) Underwood learned much about dog sled racing and Iditarod with King over the next four years, and had completed qualifying races as a “musher,” or dogsled driver, with his goal to enter Iditarod 2021. However, five days prior to the 2020 Iditarod start, Underwood found out he’d be subbing for King, who needed emergency surgery for a perforated intestine. Since he had worked and trained King’s dogs for the past four years, and with the race team ready and drop bags in place, Underwood was the logical choice to fill in for his mentor.

“I was just dumbfounded,” he said. “It was just super surreal, and you don’t really believe it, and you don’t know what to do with yourself afterwards. You’re like, ‘How do I proceed?’”

In the rush to make last-minute preparations, there was little time for worry but emotions caught up with Underwood upon arrival at the starting point. “I was just overcome with emotion, like ‘Oh my gosh, it’s starting in like three hours,’” he said.

Underwood quickly settled into “travel mode” on the trail, and his run times were better than expected. Race fans eagerly followed and cheered this rookie who came into the race as an unexpected favorite. Underwood’s confidence increased as days went by. But on the twelfth day of the race, just 34 miles from the finish line, Underwood, along with two other mushers, had to be rescued by helicopter when a sudden storm flooded their route CONTINUED on page 13