Heather Thordarson
Certification
Fleece
Heather Thordarson is originally from Portland, Oregon but now resides in beautiful Central Oregon with her husband Kristian and two sons, Kolbe and Hunter.
Heather has an extensive background in animal care and training that began with managing a large-scale boarding and training facility for dogs. After that, she worked her way up the ranks at Guide Dogs for the Blind in Boring, Oregon, before a recurring injury forced her to step away from a fulfilling career training both the dogs and visually-impaired clients. After marrying her husband in 2013, they opened a 30-stall boarding and training facility for horses on their property and shortly thereafter, purchased their first five alpacas. Heather quickly realized that raising alpacas aligned much better with her family’s lifestyle after having her sons in 2015 and 2018 and they began to pursue building an alpaca herd that would be competitive at a national level. While taking a deep dive into everything alpaca-related, Heather realized she had a knack for parsing out individual traits and selecting and breeding high quality animals. This led her to start pursuing an apprenticeship in the AOA Judge’s Certification Training and she was accepted into the program in 2023.
When Heather isn’t working on the farm or at shows, she enjoys travel, reading, and cooking for her family and friends. She has also volunteered at several dog rescues as an adoption coordinator, went to China to rescue dogs from slaughterhouses and has fostered and adopted several rescue dogs with challenging personalities. She also loves anything to do with fiber arts.