Are you up for the Trapper Nelson Challenge at Jupiter Outdoor Center?

Anyone adventurous enough to take the Trapper Nelson Challenge is following – make that paddling – in the path of one of Jupiter’s most famous and mysterious residents.

Your six-mile voyage on the Loxahatchee River to the Jupiter Inlet relives the weekly trip for supplies taken by the Legend of the Loxahatchee in the early 1930s. You’ll nose through ribbon-like channels, some just six feet wide. Snook, deer, great blue herons and ‘gators are regular visitors.

“The adventure is from the source to the sea. Paddlers will go through the source – the Loxahatchee River – and view cypress swamps, alligators and otters. Then they will get to the sea – the Atlantic Ocean – after paddling through coastal estuaries with mangroves and manatees,” said Jupiter Outdoor Center owner Rick Clegg.

You’ll pass orchids, cypress knees and Spanish Moss as you paddle to and from the swamp-surrounded homestead 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.

So did entertaining Hollywood celebrities and the local gentry from Jupiter Island and Palm Beach.

They marveled at Trapper’s Tarzan-like physique. They brought their friends to gawk at how Trapper hunted wildlife. They went home and told their friends how Trapper cooked his bounty on an outdoor fire to survive.

“I can still see Trapper at the boathouse where they sold bait. After all that rowing, he’d polish off a box of Hershey bars and wash it all down with a quart of milk,” remembers Jupiter pioneer Roy Rood.

The dream lived by Trapper – his real name was Vince Natuliewicz — ended in July, 1968.

A friend found the body of the Legend of Loxahatchee 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.