Thor Freslov has big, calloused hands, a long white beard, and at 72 is still nimble enough to make his way along icy riverbanks without any trouble. Usually he strides along with his jacket partially buttoned, even when it is well below zero and ice is forming on the water's edge.

These days you can usually find him on the Squamish River, about 45 miles North of Vancouver, where he regularly leads eagle walks.

Ever since he moved to the small community of Brackendale, in 1970, Thor has been involved with the eagles. He first came to the Squamish as a fly fisherman, drawn by the prolific Squamish salmon runs that also drew flocks of eagles from throughout the Pacific Northwest every fall and winter. Walking the gravel bars he'd often glance up to count the birds which have been described as looking like Christmas decorations hanging in the big cottonwoods along the river.

Thor (who pronounces his name, Tore) loved the river's wildness. And when a personal tragedy - the death of his first wife from a kidney disease - left him alone and pondering the fragility of life, he decided it was time to change the way he lived.

"When I found myself alone like that I thought, okay, God has given you a second chance and it's going to be a different life. But what should it be? I spent four years thinking about it."

A longshoreman at the time, working on Vancouver's waterfront, he had a vision about building an art gallery and tea house somewhere in British Columbia.
He had no business experience, had never built anything and wasn't an artist.
But he had a dream and it wouldn't go away.

"I started looking at land all over southern B.C., on my fly fishing trips, and weighing the pros and cons," he said. "One day, in 1968, I was fishing at Dragon Lake with Jack Grundle, Jim Killburn and Wade Chernenkoff. Jack had started B.C. Fish and Game Magazine, which was a great fly fishing magazine. And he was a great artist. I mean he was an icon of mine. So I asked him, 'Where do you think I should put this dream of mine?'

Mr. Grundle, who died last year, offered this sage advice: "It doesn't matter where you put it, Thor. As long as you do a good job, they will find you."

Later that year, as he fished the Squamish River, Thor wandered up from the water into Brackendale, and sat down for a coffee at Boomer's Alpine Cafe and Service Station. Looking out the window he saw a sign offering a nearby piece of land for sale.

"I figured, this has to be it," he said.
He went back to Vancouver, sold his house, bought the property, cleared it, put up a fence, then thought: "Now what?"

Not being a builder he had to call on friends for support. And they came. He modeled the gallery on an old barn he'd seen that he liked the looks of. "I spent two days in that barn, measuring everything and just figuring out how they'd built it," he said.

The Brackendale Art Gallery is now the cultural centre of the Squamish Valley. It has art shows, lectures, plays, folk concerts, classical performances and even opera, usually with a full house jamming the recycled church pews that provide seating.

It may be most famous, however, for the annual Brackendale eagle count, which has been staged out of the gallery for the past 19 years. The count was started at first just to get a handle on what was happening with the birds. But Thor soon saw the possibilities of using the eagle numbers to lobby the government for a park along the river. In 1994 he got the ammunition he needed when the bird counters came back with some incredible numbers. That winter, on the first Sunday in January, which is the traditional count day, they had tallied 3,769 eagles.

It was enough to give Brackendale bragging rights as the eagle capital of the world, supplanting Haines, Alaska. And Thor, working with a small group in Brackendale, soon convinced the British Columbia government to set up an 800-hectare eagle preserve along the lower river, to stop logging companies from taking the old growth cottonwoods where the birds like to rest, watching for dead salmon to wash ashore.

As the eagles drew more and more tourists to Brackendale, Thor's gallery flourished. The concerts are usually sold out now (the first show had one paying customer) and tour buses often stop during the winter months to unload tourists eager for eagle walks led by Thor.

At 72 he said he's started to slow down a little, but he still found enough energy to start building a three storey eagle tower recentlly, which he intends as a triage station and extended care facility for the 10 or so eagles picked up, sick or starving, along the river each year.

"It's easy to catch them," he said. "Just toss a thick blanket over them. And watch out for the talons."

The tower is designed with walls that look like folded eagle wings and the crowning touch, on the roof, is a giant eagle nest. The plan is to release the birds from the nest once they are rehabilitated. All they have to do to start their second life, is fly away, much as Thor did, 35 years earlier when he found himself alone in Vancouver.

Thor says despite his busy schedule running the gallery, building the eagle hospital and taking tourists on riverside bird walks, he still has time to go fly fishing.
"Isn't fly fishing a wonderful thing?" he says.

"I don't fish rivers much anymore. For me, paradise is sitting on a little lake among the lily pads, catching big trout."

He knows a place where he can catch 6 pound rainbows.
"It's just heaven," he says.

Editor’s Note: For more information on Thor Freslov and the Brackendale Art Gallery, go to: http://www.brackendaleartgallery.com/