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Skuleskogen National Park

Skuleskogen National Park

ForestsSwedenHöga Kusten (High Coast), Västernorrland,Sweden

A Swedish coastal park of old pine forest and bare granite domes, split by a seven-metre rock slot, on the fastest-rising coast on Earth.

September·Peaking now

Sep

The summer crowds are gone, the naturum is still open, and the air runs cool and clear for the climb up Slåttdalsberget.



Year-round The crevasse, the boulder fields and the old forest stand year-round, and the coast keeps rising about a centimetre a year.

Skuleskogen sits on the fastest-rising coast on Earth, and everything the sea left behind here is now uphill and inland. The ice sheet pressed this ground down, and since it melted the land has risen 286 metres and is still climbing about a centimetre a year. Above the Tärnätt lakes a grey field of wave-rounded cobbles spills down the slope, with ridges through it marking old storm lines. It is a beach, sorted by surf that once broke exactly there, and the lakes below it are 170 metres up. The coast path ends at two low rocky holms that used to be islands; the rising ground has tied them to the shore with sand, and you walk across dry. The park's other landmark is a split. Slåttdalsskrevan runs clean and vertical straight through Slåttdalsberget, cold air pooling at its foot and ferns gripping the walls. The floor is closed after rockfall, so you look in from the rim and from each end. The park is stitched with smaller fissures too: leaning blocks and corridors barely shoulder-wide, none of them signed. Lower down, boardwalks carry you through dark, humid spruce where pale strands of beard lichen hang from the branches, some four metres long. That lichen lives only where forest has been left uncut a very long time, and it has gone from most of Sweden's managed woodland. Higher up you break out onto open rock heath — pink granite, crooked old pines, crusts of lichen — with the Bothnian Sea beyond the treetops. This was the wild ground between the districts north and south of it, and travellers went through quickly, because robbers were said to be waiting. Bronze Age people built their burial cairns at the waterline, where a boat would see them, and those cairns now stand in forest that did not exist when they were raised.

Worth knowing

Good to know

  • The route through Slåttdalsskrevan has been closed since June 2023 after rockfall — the marked trail now climbs over Slåttdalsberget, and you look into the crevasse from its northern and southern ends.
  • The bare top of Slåttdalsberget, not the crevasse, is the real payoff — the forest drops away to the Bothnian Sea and the whole rising coast reads in a single sweep.
  • Adders bask on the sun-warm stones of the boulder fields — they move off long before you reach them, but watch where you put your hands when scrambling across on a hot day.
  • June and early July belong to the mosquitoes — the boggy hollows and boardwalk stretches are worst, and repellent matters more than a rain jacket in early summer.
  • Kälsviken is the cove to swim from — a sandy beach at the end of the coast path, with the brackish Baltic warm enough for a plunge in July and August.

Things to do

  1. 1

    Look down the length of Slåttdalsskrevan

    Look down the length of Slåttdalsskrevan

    A clean vertical split runs straight through Slåttdalsberget, cold air pooling at its foot and ferns gripping the walls. The floor path is closed, so you see it from the rim and from each end. The park is stitched with smaller fissures too — leaning blocks and corridors barely shoulder-wide, none of them signed or railed.

  2. 2

    Climb to bare granite for the Bothnian Sea

    Climb to bare granite for the Bothnian Sea

    The trail breaks out of the spruce onto open rock heath — pink granite, crooked old pines, crusts of lichen — and the sea opens up beyond the treetops. Nowhere is the Bothnian Sea deeper, or its islands higher, than off this stretch of coast.

  3. 3

    Walk the boardwalk under beard-lichen spruce

    Walk the boardwalk under beard-lichen spruce

    Wooden walkways carry you dry-footed through dark, humid spruce where pale strands of beard lichen hang from the branches — a lichen that survives only where forest has stood undisturbed. Bilberry and fern cover the floor, and woodpeckers work the standing dead trunks.

  4. 4

    Read the old shoreline in the boulder fields

    Read the old shoreline in the boulder fields

    Above the Tärnätt lakes a grey field of wave-rounded stones spills down the slope: beach cobbles sorted by surf that once broke right here. Ridges within the field mark old storm lines, and the lakes below, now 170 metres up, were once an arm of the sea.

  5. 5

    Walk out to Tärnättholmarna, islands no longer

    Walk out to Tärnättholmarna, islands no longer

    The coast path ends at two low, rocky holms on the park's Baltic shore. They were once true islands; the rising land has since joined them to the mainland with bridges of sand, and you simply walk across dry-shod. Few places let you cross an old sea channel on foot because the ground under it has lifted.

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