In the late summer of 1921 the British travel writer Stephen Graham and the American poet Vachel Lindsay hiked northwards through Glacier National Park. Both men had in their different literary spheres established reputations as refugees from modernity, writing books and poems that tried to articulate a vision of alternative societies in which life could be free from the materialism and corruption of western civilisation. The two men retreated to Glacier Park both to discuss their ideas and to seek a natural world where they could find a solace they could not find elsewhere. Both men wrote books about their sojourn, presenting the Park as a place where the mundane could give access to the numinous and in turn foster a remaking of the self. Their books illuminate important questions about the challenge of capturing the spiritual in the language of both poetry and prose .