Weatherby Trucking. Deep Family Roots in Yellowknife’s Mining History
By Bill Braden
Even though he was born a Gen-Xer, Blair Weatherby, now 48, is pretty much an old-school kind of guy. Perhaps it’s his Yellowknife heritage. On his mother’s side, the family’s been in Yellowknife since 1937 – that’s 80 years! Maybe it’s his core business vision, built on deep family roots in mining and construction (his godfather, Del Curry, owned Curry Construction, a big name in the town’s early years). It’s easily evident in his love of old trucks. One of his first was a 1975 Kenworth gravel truck, bought when he was 22. It’s been fully restored, painted shiny blue, and is still part of the working fleet at Weatherby Trucking Ltd. That fleet now approaches 90 pieces of equipment – trucks, trailers, loaders, cranes, ploughs – all carefully added by Weatherby since officially launching the business 20 years ago. “Being around my dad, Gordon, and my uncle, Bob, all the time, I was the kid driving in and out of the gravel pit. I just happened to be in it,” he says in the roomy office at WTL’s yard on Highway 3, just down from the Yellowknife Golf Course. He didn’t make it past Grade 10 at Sir John Franklin High School, and was working for Robinson’s Trucking when he was 15.
After a few years working with Yellowknife prospector Mike Magrum, he struck out on his own and started Weatherby Trucking in 1997 at age 28. The early focus was on exploration but as that dwindled he moved into civil construction: earthmoving, heavy hauling, demolition and recovering big rigs from accidents on the road and in the water. Weatherby’s colourful website is wallpapered with great photos showing the diversity of his operation. “We’ve always been pretty much mine-based in our construction. The big opportunity opened when we got the ore haul contract from Giant Mine to the Con Mine processing mill in 2000,” he says, a 400 tonne-per-day contract that lasted more than four years. “I was able to build from there. That blended into the mine reclamation projects, and we’ve been working at both sites ever since. I’ve had 17 years with the same customer base.”
Weatherby has resisted building a fleet to get into the annual ice road resupply to the diamond mines, but says other local entrepreneurs have. Those companies are now looking for more off-season work, creating an “exponentially more competitive” heavy construction environment. But crushing and crane work are two new areas he’s exploring. “We have to keep with the times, and just keep moving and changing to keep a flow going,” Weatherby says. The Weatherbys are big-time community boosters. They sponsor the Weatherby Warriors novice hockey team, helped build the Bristol Pit snowboard park, and support the Army Cadets and SPCA, among others. More recently, they kick-started the NWT chapter of the Canadian Brain Tumour Foundation when their son-in-law Matt was diagnosed; they blew past the first fundraising target of $10,000, collecting more than $52,000. Weatherby leads a classic family business. His wife Kelley and daughter Aven run the office, and his son Dustin is one of eight full-time employees. Weatherby doesn’t see expanding outside of Yellowknife, and dreams that one day his family will take the driver’s seat. Nathan, his five-year-old grandson, would take it over tomorrow, he says, smiling. YKCI
