Thor Stephenson Jr. thought his life had ended in a North Dakota cornfield.
He remembers the blood pooling beneath him, the cold, the pain, then the realization that nobody was coming fast enough.
On Nov. 1, 2013, Stephenson's 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 showed up.
“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, where the gentle giant works, strangers point at it 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 a part of him.
Its his middle finger to self-pity, a symbol of resilience.
Stephenson was living in Williston, North Dakota, at the time of the accident, working and hunting like a lot of men do in the oil patch.
That morning, he and his dad were walking single-file between a cornfield and a row of trees.
Then came the misfire. The shotgun tore through the back of his left knee at point-blank range.
“It was pretty traumatic,” Stephenson said flatly.
By the time emergency crews got him out, stabilized him, flew him across multiple states and finally landed him in a Level 1 trauma center in St. Paul, Minnesota, roughly 11 hours had passed.
Doctors amputated his left leg above the knee almost immediately.
The Brutal Little Things
Stephenson told Cowboy State Daily that the mental side of losing a limb wasn’t actually the hardest part. The physical reality was worse.
That wasn't because of dramatic movie moments, but because of the tiny humiliations. Things like taking a shower, going down the stairs, and getting into a car became Herculean feats overnight.
Trying to carry groceries while balancing on crutches.
Trying not to eat pavement every time he moved across ice.
“Just normal things in life that you don’t think about until you lose a limb,” he said.
His first prosthetic was “garbage,” Stephenson said, adding that it was poorly fitted, uncomfortable, and unstable.
Because of that, he stayed mostly in a wheelchair for close to a year after the amputation.
Then, a random guy at a Taco Johns noticed Stephenson in his wheelchair and asked why he wasn’t using a prosthetic.
Stephenson explained the situation, and the man told him about a prosthetist in Casper named Kamil Leman.
That conversation changed Stephenson’s life.
Brown And Gold Or Nothing
To understand why Stephenson wrapped his prosthetic in University of 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."
So when it came time to customize the prosthetic, there really wasn’t another option.
“I’ve always bled brown and gold,” Stephenson said.
But the deeper reason has less to do with sports than identity. To Stephenson, Wyoming represents endurance — hard people surviving hard places.
“The Wyoming Cowboys, I think of toughness, I think of grit,” he said.
He talked about miners, ranchers, roughnecks, wagon trains and old-school Wyoming resilience with reverence.
“This whole state was built on strength and integrity,” he said.
And after losing a leg, Stephenson needed something that still felt like him. Beige simply would not do.
Learning To Trust
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,” he said.
"You definitely don’t trust ice” Stephenson added.
Then there’s the pain nobody really talks about, like skin breaking down, your "stump" wearing down and swelling, and socket issues. The list goes on.
“There’s days where the leg isn’t fitting great, or I’m tired, or I’m in pain,” Stephenson said.
But somewhere over the years, the prosthetic stopped feeling foreign.
It's become more than a tool, it's a personality trait. He doesn't let the loss of his leg slow him down, either.
Today Stephenson works full-time at Home Depot.
He's still hunting, fishing, and hiking. He carries logs.
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.
Now he just does them.
The Part He Usually Doesn’t Tell People
There’s another layer to the story Stephenson doesn’t always talk about publicly.
The accidental blast that changed his life came from his dad’s gun during the hunt. 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 in Stephenson when he talks about it.
If anything, the accident fused them closer together.
“He’s been solid by my side through it all,” Stephenson said.
The two still talk every day before work. They still watch Wyoming games together, everything from football to volleyball.
'Your Life Isn’t Over'
Stephenson has become the kind of amputee strangers approach in public.
He radiates the energy of somebody who’s already been through hell and came out functional on the other side.
Recently, another amputee stopped him outside a Chinese buffet in Rock Springs and the two ended up talking for half an hour in the parking lot.
Stephenson now helps connect other amputees with prosthetists, advice and support
He remembers exactly what those early days felt like, and he knows what people need to hear in those moments.
He tells others what "the guy at the Wiggle Your Toes Foundation" told him over a decade ago: "Your life isn't over, but your new normal is."
That sentence sounds less like optimism coming from him and more like a hard-earned fact.
“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.”
Stephenson is still exactly what he always was — a Wyoming man who can pack out an elk, haul 10-foot logs over his shoulder, and tailgate for the Cowboys like nobody’s business.
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
