Hardy left the priesthood in 1994 to marry Susana Gonzalez, the mother of his stepson, Carlos, in Venezuela. Though the couple divorced six years later, Hardy said they remain friends.

“I think I am alive today because I started running 30 years ago,” he said with a smile, veering slightly toward the campground’s P.O. boxes to check the headlines of The Casper Star-Tribune for news of the last debate. “It’s a time for reflection about what happened the day before and the day ahead. I carry with me all the time a little tape recorder, and when I have an idea, I blurt it into the tape recorder. A lot of my ideas come while I am running.”

He said the idea to run for political office came to him after a 10-day retreat in which he took a vow of silence, sharing his reflections only with a priest friend for an hour per day.

“At the end of it, I thought, ‘My health is still good,’ and so I asked myself, ‘How could I make the best contribution to humanity? And what responsibility did I feel?’” Hardy said.

After that, he said, he and 100 volunteers went door to door gathering some of the 3,746 signatures he needed to get on the ballot as an independent for the state’s sole House seat.

“We in Wyoming are the most politically powerful people in the United States,” said Hardy. “We have two senators and a representative, and we are a small number of people, so we can get in and meet with them.”

Hardy fell a few hundred signatures short of getting on the ballot in 2012. But the idea stuck, and he won the Senate primary on Aug. 19 this year to become the state’s Democratic candidate. It was never going to be easy, he said. Wyoming is overwhelmingly Republican, and Enzi was re-elected in 2008 with a robust 75.8 percent of the vote.