Fulufjället National Park

Listen first. Somewhere ahead, beyond the pines, there is a low and steady roar. It never quite stops. Underfoot, the path is soft with needles and moss, and the air smells of resin and cold water. The light here comes in thin, pale shafts through the spruce. This is Fulufjället, a mountain plateau in the far northwest of Dalarna, in Sweden. The sound you can hear is the reason most people walk this trail. But the mountain has more to show than one waterfall.

Fulufjället became a national park in 2002. It sits right against the Norwegian border, and on the far side the mountain continues as Norway's own Fulufjellet National Park. Together the two parks protect one connected landscape. Think of it as a high, flat-topped table of rock. It rises above the forests of the Älvdalen district, and it is cut at its edges by steep valleys and fast streams.

The rock itself is worth a moment. Much of this mountain is sandstone, very old, laid down as sediment long before any of this was mountain at all. Look at the boulders beside the path. Many have a warm, reddish or greyish tone, and some show thin layers like the pages of a closed book. Over the ages, ice and water have worked at these layers. The landscape you see is the slow result of that work.

Now, the roar. Follow it, and the forest opens onto Njupeskär, the highest waterfall in Sweden. The water drops over a dark cliff into a narrow ravine. For the longest part of its descent it falls free, touching nothing, before it breaks on the rocks below. On a damp day, a fine mist drifts out across the viewing area. You may feel it on your face before you see the full height of the fall.

Here is something many visitors do not expect. In winter, Njupeskär freezes. The falling water builds into a huge column of blue-white ice. Ice climbers come to this cliff in the coldest months, roped together, working their way up the frozen fall. If you visit in summer, try to picture it. The same rock face, silent, with a wall of ice where the water now runs.

Walk back from the falls and let your eyes drop to the ground. On the higher parts of the mountain, the earth is covered in a thick, pale carpet of lichen. It is creamy white, almost the colour of old bone, and it crunches when it is dry. In much of the Swedish mountains, reindeer graze this lichen down. Fulufjället lies outside the regular reindeer herding areas, so here the lichen grows deep and undisturbed. Walking across it can feel like walking on a frozen sea.

And now the second surprise, the one that put this mountain in newspapers around the world. Up on the slopes grows a small, rather ordinary-looking Norway spruce. Scientists call it Old Tjikko. It was studied by the Swedish researcher Leif Kullman, and dating of material from its roots suggests the tree has been regenerating from the same root system for more than nine thousand years.

That needs a little explaining. The trunk you can see is not nine thousand years old. Spruce trees in harsh places can send up new stems when an old one dies, and they can root again from low branches. So the visible tree is young. The living organism beneath it, however, appears to have been here since soon after the last ice sheet melted away. In those years, people in this part of Europe were still living by hunting and fishing.

The trees around you tell the same story of a hard climate. Near the treeline, the spruces grow low and twisted, some of them barely knee-high. Many grow wider than they are tall, spreading out close to the ground where the snow protects them in winter. Up here, a tree survives by staying small. Notice how the forest thins as the path climbs, and how quickly the open plateau takes over.

Water shapes this place in sudden ways as well as slow ones. In the late 1990s, an extreme rainstorm hit the mountain. Streams rose fast and cut deep new channels through soil and forest. Loose boulders and fallen trees were carried down the slopes. Some of the scars from that flood are still visible as raw gullies and fans of stone. It is a reminder that the quiet you hear today can change in a single night.

The park is also home to wildlife that keeps well out of sight. Brown bears and lynx move through these forests, though most visitors never see them. You are more likely to hear birds in the trees, or to spot a small mammal crossing the path. Look for tracks in soft mud near the streams. A quiet walker, early in the morning, always has the best chance of seeing something.

At the entrance area stands the park's visitor centre, called a naturum in Swedish. It is a good place to start or end your visit. There you can learn about the geology, the plants and the animals before you head into the forest. The trails from here vary from an easy walk to the waterfall to longer routes up onto the open plateau. Choose a route that matches the weather and your energy, because conditions on the high ground change fast.

There is one more thing about Fulufjället that is easy to miss in daylight. The park lies far from any large town, so the nights here can be very dark. On a clear evening in autumn or winter, the sky fills with stars, and sometimes with the soft green movement of the northern lights. If you stay nearby, step outside after dark. Let your eyes adjust for a few minutes. The mountain looks completely different under that sky.

Before you go, stand still for a moment wherever you are now. Feel the cool air coming off the water. Listen again to that steady roar, which has carried on through every season you will never see. Look at the lichen, the low spruces, the layered stone. As you walk back down the path, notice how slowly the sound of the falls fades behind you... and how long the quiet of the forest stays with you afterwards.