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Skuleskogen National Park

Skuleskogen National Park

ForestsHöga Kusten (High Coast), Västernorrland, Sweden
August·Peaking now

Jun–Aug

The park at full stretch: all three entrances and 30 km of trail open, naturum staffed, and Kälsviken's brackish cove warm enough — about 16°C — for a swim. Mosquitoes own June and early July; some busy July days the South Entrance fills and closes.



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 stands on ground that is still climbing out of the sea, and no land on Earth is known to climb faster. Released from the ice sheet that pressed it down, the coast has sprung back about 285 metres and still rises roughly a centimetre a year. That rise has left its marks all over the park. Its oldest shoreline, cut by waves when the ice had only just gone, runs across the hills at about 282 metres: above that line forest grows on moraine the sea never touched; below it the rock lies scrubbed bare. Fields of stones sit in ridges where storm waves once sorted them, and Bronze Age burial cairns, raised at the water's edge, now stand 30 to 50 metres above the sea in deep forest. Splitting the middle of the park is Slåttdalsskrevan, a slot 200 metres long, seven metres wide and 30 metres deep, opened where a band of diabase, injected into the red granite 1.2 billion years ago, weathered away faster than the rock around it. Walking here, you feel the geology underfoot. Paths cross rounded stones that shift and clack, climb bare granite domes held by wind-bent pines more than 500 years old, and drop into humid spruce where beard lichen hangs in pale strands from the branches. Much of this forest was logged in the late 1800s; the poor rock ledges, never worth cutting, keep the true ancients. In the crevasse's permanent cold shade, mountain plants survive close to sea level. One thing has changed: since June 2023 you can no longer walk the floor of Slåttdalsskrevan, closed after rockfall. The clearest proof of the rising land waits at the shore, where the Tärnättholmarna rocks were once true islands and are now joined to the mainland by bars of sand you can walk across.

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 in the shade at its foot and ferns gripping the sheer walls. The path along the floor is closed, so you now see the crevasse from the rim above and from each end. Looking down its full 200-metre length is what makes the size sink in.

  2. 2

    Slip through the mossy clefts below the mountain

    Slip through the mossy clefts below the mountain

    Beyond the famous crevasse, the park is stitched with smaller fissures: leaning blocks, fern-choked corridors and passages barely shoulder-wide. Nothing has been built at any of them — no sign, no railing, no platform — and you find each one on its own as the trail threads between the boulders.

  3. 3

    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.

  4. 4

    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.

  5. 5

    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.

  6. 6

    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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