Tresticklan

Tresticklan, pressed against the Norwegian border in northwest Dalsland, protects something southern Scandinavia has almost none of left: a big, roadless, unbroken pine forest. The park (1996) and the Norwegian forest it merges with form one of the largest wild woodland blocks south of the mountain chain — no through roads, no farms, no light pollution, just ridge after ridge of slow-grown pine on thin, ice-scraped soil.

The architecture is rift-valley country: the bedrock is cracked into long parallel ridges running roughly north–south, with narrow lakes and mires filling the slots between. Walking with the grain of the land is easy and rhythmic; walking across it is a workout of repeated little climbs, and the park's trail system sensibly does mostly the former. The poverty of the soil is the aesthetic — sparse, open pine heath floored with reindeer lichen, more like Norrland than like anything else this far south, with the lakes (the three-armed Stora Tresticklan among them gives the park its name) as dark punctuation.

The emptiness is biological too, in the good sense: this is quiet-country fauna — capercaillie and black grouse, cranes on the mires, moose everywhere and the occasional passing wolf, in one of the corners of Sweden where the species re-established itself.

What's worth knowing before you go

The entrance lies at Räserud near Nössemark, up the western shore of the great lake Stora Le; Ed is the local town. Marked loops run from a few kilometres to a full day, and the dry pine terrain makes for fast, pleasant walking by wilderness standards — this is arguably the gentlest "real" solitude in the park system. Berry and mushroom season in late August is the local high point.

The connoisseur's spot is the Orshöjden viewpoint: forest to every horizon, half of it Norwegian, none of it lit at night — stay for dusk, and you get a darkness southern Sweden otherwise no longer manufactures.