Amputee Shows His Love For Wyoming With $68,000 Brown-And-Gold Bucking Horse Leg

Thor Stephenson Jr. thought his life had ended in a North Dakota cornfield. On Nov. 1, 2013, his father accidentally blasted him behind the knee with a 20-gauge shotgun from only a few feet away while they were hunting pheasants. He laid there for nearly two hours before emergency responders arrived. “I honestly thought I was going to die,” Stephenson said.

Today, more than 12 years later, Stephenson walks into work wearing a custom $68,000 University of Wyoming prosthetic leg wrapped in brown-and-gold swagger and the famous bucking horse logo. People stop him constantly to stare at it. At the Home Depot in Rock Springs, strangers point from across aisles. “Dude, that’s a really cool leg,” they tell him. Stephenson grins because the thing attached to his body—the thing that once symbolized catastrophe—has become his middle finger to self-pity, a symbol of resilience.

Doctors amputated his left leg above the knee almost immediately after the accident. Stephenson said the mental side of losing a limb wasn’t actually the hardest part. The physical reality was worse—the tiny humiliations like taking a shower, going down stairs, getting into a car. “Just normal things in life that you don’t think about until you lose a limb,” he said. His first prosthetic was “garbage,” poorly fitted and unstable, so he stayed mostly in a wheelchair for close to a year. Then a random guy at a Taco Johns told him about a prosthetist in Casper named Kamil Leman. That conversation changed his life.

To understand why Stephenson wrapped his prosthetic in Wyoming colors, you have to understand that Cowboys football wasn’t just entertainment in his house growing up—it was ritual, almost a religion. His father attended UW and played in the marching band. Stephenson grew up listening to Cowboys games on the radio with his dad. As a kid, he dressed up as Pistol Pete so often his mother still calls him “Pete.” “I’ve always bled brown and gold,” Stephenson said. To him, Wyoming represents endurance—hard people surviving hard places. “The Wyoming Cowboys, I think of toughness, I think of grit,” he said. “This whole state was built on strength and integrity.”

One of the strangest things about prosthetics, Stephenson said, is that you initially don’t trust them at all. “You don’t trust that the knee will hold up when you’re going down the stairs, and that you won’t fall on your face. You definitely don’t trust ice.” Then there’s the pain nobody really talks about: skin breaking down, the stump wearing down and swelling, socket issues. “There’s days where the leg isn’t fitting great, or I’m tired, or I’m in pain,” he said. But somewhere over the years, the prosthetic stopped feeling foreign. Today, Stephenson works full-time at Home Depot. He’s still hunting, fishing, and hiking. Last year, he hiked miles into the timber on an elk hunt with a rifle slung over his shoulder. “When I first was an amputee, those are things that I didn’t think I’d ever really be able to do again,” he said.

The accidental blast that changed his life came from his dad’s gun. Stephenson said the experience wrecked his father emotionally. “It was harder on him than it was on me,” he said, adding that there’s no bitterness. If anything, the accident fused them closer together. “He’s been solid by my side through it all.” The two still talk every day before work and still watch Wyoming games together. Stephenson now helps connect other amputees with prosthetists, advice, and support. He tells others what he was told over a decade ago: “Your life isn’t over, but your new normal is.” He added, “It may be scary right now, but if you trust in your prosthetic, put the work in and believe in yourself, you can get to where I’m at.”