Fulufjället
A high plateau in northern Dalarna with the Njupeskär waterfall and the world's oldest known spruce.
Fulufjället is a table mountain — a broad, flat-topped massif in northernmost Dalarna whose plateau stands apart from the main Scandinavian range, and apart from its economy too: uniquely among Swedish fell areas, Fulufjället lies outside the reindeer herding grounds. With no grazing, the plateau has grown something no other Swedish mountain has — a deep, unbroken carpet of reindeer lichen, pale green-white to the horizon, that crunches like snow in dry weather and makes the top of the mountain look faintly lunar.
The park's front-page attraction hangs off the plateau's edge: Njupeskär, Sweden's highest waterfall, where a stream steps off the escarpment in a 93-metre drop, about 70 of it free fall, into a dark horseshoe of cliffs. In winter it freezes into a chandelier that ice climbers travel for. Its quieter rival for fame grows a few kilometres away on the bare fell: Old Tjikko, a spindly little spruce whose root system has been cloning itself in place for roughly 9,500 years — the oldest known living tree system on earth, discovered by the geographer Leif Kullman and named after his dog.
The mountain also carries the scar of a single night. On 30–31 August 1997 a stalled thunderstorm dropped some 300–400 millimetres of rain on the massif — the heaviest downpour ever recorded in Sweden — and the becks coming off the plateau tore whole new ravines through the forest at Göljån, moving boulders the size of cars. The devastation was left as it fell, and walking through it is the best lesson in catastrophic geology the country offers. The park itself was inaugurated in 2002, Sweden's first of the new century.
What's worth knowing before you go
The gateway is Särna, half an hour away; the main entrance below Njupeskär has a naturum, and the waterfall loop is an easy four-kilometre round that most visitors never go beyond. The plateau is the real park — marked trails climb through the birch belt onto the lichen heath, with the Rösjöstugorna cabins making an overnight possible. Old Tjikko is reached on guided walks from the naturum in season; going ad hoc is discouraged, and the tree's exact neighbourhood is deliberately kept low-key.
The connoisseur's season is early winter: Njupeskär frozen, the crowds gone, and the lichen plateau under first snow — two white landscapes stacked on top of each other.