These adventurers guide Spanish-speakers through Oregon’s outdoors

On a hot July day in Maupin, two dozen rafters in borrowed life vests stand clutching paddles at a boat launch on the Lower Deschutes River, listening as a rafting guide goes over the finer points of navigating class III rapids.

To ensure they’ve understood, the leader of the group, Anibal Rocheta, sporting pink sunglasses and a weathered sun shirt, translates the highlights of the presentation into Spanish. Mostly, how not to hit your companions with your paddle.

Rocheta and his partner Maria Teresa Lopes are political refugees from Venezuela and the founders of Loco por la Aventura (that’s “Crazy for Adventure”), a small Portland-based business that aims to make the outdoors more accessible for Oregon’s growing Latino and Hispanic communities, which surged from 2% of the population in 1980 to 14% of Oregonians in 2020.

“I want to show what’s special about the outdoors and how important outdoor activities are for our physical and mental health,” Rocheta says in Spanish.

Climbing, caving and mountaineering are Rocheta’s passions. But he’s happy to take people camping, canoeing or hiking. Anything to spark an interest in the outdoors among a diverse group of people that might bump into a language barrier when trying to get outside in the Pacific Northwest. On this summer day, the adventure is whitewater rafting.

Lopes sees the excitement among a group of young men and teenagers and encourages them to form what she calls a “loco raft.”

“So much energy,” she says in Spanish as they bounce aboard. Lopes joins them in the stern, a broad smile on her face.