Skuleskogen National Park

ForestsHöga 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 National Park is a coastal park of old pine forest and bare granite domes on the High Coast of Sweden, in Västernorrland on the Gulf of Bothnia, split by a rock slot seven metres wide and forty deep, on the fastest-rising coast on Earth, where the land is still coming up out of the sea at nearly a centimetre a year since the ice left, and it is walked on trails from the spruce to the pink granite and the sea. The High Coast is a UNESCO site for the rebound, since the ice sheet pressed the land down by hundreds of metres and it has risen 286 metres since, so that Bronze Age burial cairns raised at the water's edge now stand high on the hills, and above the Tärnätt lakes a grey field of wave-rounded cobbles spills down the slope, a beach sorted by surf that once broke right there; Slåttdalsskrevan, the slot, is a clean vertical split through the mountain of Slåttdalsberget, with cold air pooling at its foot and ferns gripping the walls, and the trail above it breaks out of the spruce onto open rock heath of pink granite, crooked old pines and crusts of lichen with the sea beyond the treetops. Wooden walkways carry the walker through dark humid spruce where pale strands of beard lichen hang from the branches, a lichen that survives only where forest has stood undisturbed. The forest was the wild no-man's-land between the districts north and south of it, the robbers' forest that travellers on the coast road went through quickly, and it is now one of the last old-growth forests on the Swedish coast. The coast path ends at Tärnättholmarna, two low rocky holms on the shore that were islands and are joined to the land now by the rising ground, and blue anemones flower along the Kälsviken trail in May. Skuleskogen is a forest on a coast that is climbing out of the sea, and the old beaches are on the hills.

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
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
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
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
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
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.