10-4 Magazine December 2024

Recession in 2007, Delton began downsizing the operation to just six or seven trucks in total. Today, Aamodt Inc. has one company-owned truck and eight leased owner operators. Delton’s son Blayne was born around the same time that Delton bought his first truck in 1993. Now 31 years old, Blayne grew up in the shop. After school, he would head straight into the shop – he was fascinated with the trucks. Blayne never really dreamed of driving a truck but enjoyed working on them. By the time Blayne was old enough to go out on the road, his dad was already working in the office, so he did not get to go out driving with him very much. He did, however, go out with a driver named John Adams a lot. John was a grouchy old man, but the two got along fine. Blayne was driving trucks around the yard at a very young age, and then at around 13 or 14 years old, while out on a run with John, they switched seats, and he drove for the first time out on the open road. But Blayne still wasn’t sold on driving trucks. During high school, Blayne drove a grain truck par t-time for a local farmer, and then, after graduation, he moved to Nor th Dakota and worked in the oilfields, hauling belly dumps and building pads for the drilling rigs, for about two years. After getting caught one too many times by the DOT for not being properly licensed to do the work he was doing in the state he was doing it in, he went back to Bonners Ferry and worked as a mechanic in the shop. He also did a little local log trucking, but again, was still not sold on driving a truck for a living. Once Blayne turned 23 and was able to get on the company insurance plan, he jumped in his dad’s 1994 Peterbilt 379, which he had bought new, and began doing a regular run of hauling lumber down to Denver, CO, and then steel back, with multiple drops along the way. And with that, everything changed. Blayne realized he had never gone anywhere in a truck, and that all his driving had been local, but once he got out on the open road, he loved it. And just like that, he got bit by the trucking bug, and was all in! Owning and running an 800-hp Massey Ferguson tractor with an inline six Detroit and three turbos, Delton has competed in tractor pull events for over 35 years. While traveling to one of these events in 2018 and hauling the tractor with his 379 Peterbilt, Delton blew the engine up (that’s the story Blayne tells but Delton might beg to disagree). While at the tractor pull event, Delton began asking if anyone had a truck to sell, and one man said he might have a 362 Peterbilt cabover available. Delton was interested, but the guy later came back and said it was needed as a spare truck and not for sale. End of story. A few months later, in March of 2019, Blayne bought his first truck – a 2016 Peterbilt 389 with a 36” flat top sleeper – and became an owner operator (leased to Aamodt, of course). About six months after that, the guy with the cabover called Delton and said the truck was now available, however, the Cummins N14 Celect it was equipped with, had recently quit working. Because of that, the truck was offered for dir t cheap, and because Delton had shown interest 10-4 Magazine / December 2024 11