By day, adventurer Travis Pieper is a loan officer at the First State Bank in Farnam, Nebraska. It’s a town of about 150 if you count the people driving through, he said. By night and weekend, he remains extremely active: golfing, snowboarding, doing backflips on a trampoline, and helping kids shoot a rifle – he served as a guest shooter with the Clay Center Trap Shooting Team last weekend. It’s all things he’s learned to do with one side of his body. 

Self-dubbed “The All-Right Guy,” Pieper is a double amputee after losing his entire left leg and left arm above the elbow in a 2023 motorcycle crash. He was hit head-on when a driver passed in the fog.

After more than 40 surgeries, sometimes looking forward to the process, as it was the only time he was without pain, Pieper has re-learned how to do almost everything in life. 

“It’s constant,” he said. “I’m constantly adapting; I don’t do anything the same as I once did.” 

First that was through helping on his brother’s ranch, working cattle and delivering seed for his business.

“That was some good physical therapy,” he said. “It was good to be out and doing things.” 

In total, Pieper spent two months in the ICU, followed by a month in in-patient rehab. 

“I had a long list of what was wrong,” he said. Adding that his leg was initially removed above the knee. Meanwhile, his left elbow had shattered. Later, he developed mucormycosis, a type of fungal infection. It’s an ailment typically seen in victims of an IED, he said, and doctors believe his was due to sliding through dirt and grass. Ultimately, this complication caused Pieper to go through with the removal of his leg at the hip socket.

“It was a hard decision but an easy one to know I didn’t want the infection to get into my organs or pelvis,” he said. Pieper continued to struggle with his left arm, which took him to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.  

“There were just a lot of complications with my arm,” he said. He’d had bones pinned into place and worn a soft cast, which caused external bruising in addition to the internal damage. 

“They checked it out and said, ‘We’re going to cut your arm off in the morning,’ because they found grass and stuff in my arm still.” The amputation took place a few inches above his elbow. “It wasn’t a big surprise, but I was still actively looking for anything we could possibly do. I had already cashed in all the miracles that I had.” 

From learning to walk through pain and healing muscles, to learning the nuances of insurance paperwork, to using a strap to help include his left shoulder while golfing, Pieper has adjusted.

“My golf handicap didn’t change though,” he said. “I’m just as bad as I was before.” He’s also done more climbing since the accident, he said. 

“I’ve hiked more miles and climbed more mountains with one leg than I ever did with two,” he said. After a full hip disarticulation – removal of the hip socket – it takes 85-100% more exertion for every step. 

Making it even more impressive that he’s taken more than a half-million steps on his prosthetic leg, a number he tracks through a microprocessor in the knee. He simply doubles the number to account for his biological leg’s movements, taking him to over 1 million steps in all.

“My leg has a five-year warranty and I’m going to do my all to use it up before then,” he said. Adding that it had already been rebuilt once, though that was due to a manufacturing error. Pieper has a second leg he can switch out for athletic activities. This one includes shocks but doesn’t have a microprocessor so it can be used in water. 

Getting the prosthetic in itself was another hassle, he said, with multiple denials from insurance. Then approval on the knee and ankle joint, but not the hip. It took multiple appeals, he said – the icing on $4 million in medical bills. 

To-date, however, he remains without a left arm. Due tobrachial plexus trauma, Pieper lacks the muscle or nerve control for a prosthetic hand. He’s hopeful to try out a body-powered arm in the future, which could be controlled by his right arm. 

“That will take a little more playing around and figuring that arm out,” he said. “I just don’t have the function to get it to work well.” Ideally, he can get a hand to clamp onto a motorcycle handle with an emergency release. After all, getting back on a Harley is his biggest goal of all. 

For now, he settles with a battery-powered dirt bike; he’s also ridden on the back of a friend’s bike. 

Through it all he’s kept his humor; he poses in front of relatable backgrounds: in front of Peg Leg Brewery, under a giant flamingo on its left leg, at San Francisco’s left-hand store named – what else? – Lefty’s. He now dons tattoos reading, “it’s just a flesh wound” and “some assembly required.” 

He also offers motivational talks on the importance of attitude and the one thing in life a person can control: perspective. 

For instance, accepting the accident and using it to move forward rather than place blame.

“She was ok, which is good because she was pregnant, her and the baby were ok,” he said. 

“She wasn’t charged but it wouldn’t have grown my leg back, so it really doesn’t matter. Her having consequences isn’t going to do anything. But I’m not a vindictive person, ruining her life isn’t going to make mine any better.”

Topics like those are also part of the conversation when Pieper speaks as The All Right Guy. 

“Most of what I talk about is how my earlier childhood and what I did growing up turned me into the man I am today and gave me the tools to handle adversity,” he said. “I remember having motivational speakers in high school and I connected with them. I wanted to use this story to help other kids. My respect and character, that’s a lot of the reason people stuck around and wanted to see me heal. I like to think I always had a good attitude and I’ve been told that – positive attitude and perspective didn’t start in the ICU, it just got a whole lot more evident.”