Florida Adventure Trail - Overlanding the Osceola National Forest - Jeep JK Rubicon Recon Offroad

Home, no matter how far away I venture, it's a place that I always come back to. For all the great adventures that the mountains bring me, Florida is where I seem to have my most memorable ones. Join us today as I return home to explore the Osceola National Forest. Coming at you today from Osceola National Forest. If you've seen my other videos, you know that I've already recorded one out here. You might be thinking, why do another one? Today's special because today we're following the Florida Adventure Trail. So we'll be hitting the route as it goes through the Osceola National Forest. It's getting a little cloudy. It's getting a little breezy. It may turn out to be a wet adventure, but we'll see. So join us on the trail. Osceola National Forest is over 190,000 acres of pine forest and swamp land located less than an hour from my hometown of Jacksonville. The Osceola National Forest is a special place for me. In addition to being close to where I grew up, it's where many years ago that I first learned to drive off-road. I'm joined on this adventure by my cousin Matt and today we're following the Florida Adventure Trail. The Florida Adventure Trail is a nearly 1,200 mile overland route that starts in North Florida near Osceola before heading into Central Florida and eventually west to the Florida Panhandle. Check out FloridaAdventureTrail.com to learn more. It wasn't long before we started seeing the signs of recent fire activity. While it may look ominous, these areas have recently had prescribed burns. These burns are an important part of wildfire mitigation and are conducted regularly in the forest. As we made our way further along the trail, the amount of water on the trail began to steadily increase. The upside of bringing a driver is that you get to have all the fun setting up all the nasty wet shots. Well this one ought to be fun. There's not many places where you can drive through actual swampland. Osceola is located very close to the Okefenokee Swamp and it shows as you get further north into the forest. This section of trail is wedged between Big Gum Swamp, Buckhead Swamp, and Impassable Bay Swamp and it is wet. Combined with recent rainfall, this area was a sloppy mess. Some of this water can get pretty deep so we're trying to play it safe and stick to the outside on some of them. I got stuck riding solo in Osceola many years ago. It's an experience that I prefer not to repeat if I can help it. We've cleared the main swampy area of the trail but there is still plenty of water around. With all of that water behind us, we're finally able to move at a respectable pace and try to meet my goal of being out of the forest by dark. Sunset was upon us. Sunset in the forest is a special time. This one marked the impending end to a long day spent exploring one of Florida's most underrated off-roading areas. In case you were wondering. As we made our way out of Osceola, we passed one of its campgrounds and a group of forerunners coming in. My first thought was whether or not they were following the Florida Adventure Trail as well. I hope they were and I hope that you will as well. We have finished the Osceola National Forest portion of the Florida Adventure Trail. It was a fun day. There was a lot of water. Hopefully we got good footage of it. It's almost dark now and we are just now at US-90 so we ran it today from 441 through Osceola to US-90. There are a lot of good videos out there on the Florida Adventure Trail so please check them out. I can't remember all the channels but please check out Baptism Overland, Overland Ruse, Sunshine State Vikings, and a massive shout out to Sunshine State Adventure Company for knitting all these trails together and creating a statewide trail system. It was long overdue and I'm glad that somebody took the initiative and got it done. Hopefully this video comes out good. I wasn't solo today. I have my cousin with me who is working the camera right now so hopefully the video turns out good. Until next time, this has been Defined Off-Road.