Anyone adventurous enough to take the Trapper Nelson Challenge with JUPITER OUTDOOR CENTER is paddling the path of one of Jupiter’s most mysterious residents.
Your six-hour voyage on the Loxahatchee River at Riverbend Park to Jonathan Dickinson State Park relives Trapper's weekly supply trip in the early 1930s. You’ll nose through ribbon-like channels. Snook, deer, great blue herons and ‘gators are regulars.
You’ll pass orchids, cypress knees and Spanish Moss to the swamp-surrounded home Trapper set up when he was just 23. Skinning ‘gators, selling furs, trapping animals, running a zoo and growing citrus kept the blue-eyed New Jersey native busy for 35 years.
The dream lived by Trapper – his real name was Vince Natuliewicz — ended in July, 1968.
A friend found Trapper's body outdoors in a picnic pavilion. There was a shotgun wound in his left chest. Trapper was 59.
What happened, and who did it, remains a Jupiter mystery.
