Spring in Sweden’s High Coast

After spending a week in Uppsala for a DNA barcoding workshop as part of my PhD I decided to delay my flight home by five days so I could do some hiking and nature photography in Sweden. I rented a car on the Friday afternoon after the workshop ended and drove 500km north up to Sweden’s High Coast.

As I traveled along the coastal motorway by the Baltic Sea the low sun was flickering between the pine trees towards the west and I could hear the frost crackling underneath my tires. More and more snow began to build up on the roadside and the lakes became frozen over the further north I went.

I spent four days in the wilderness of Sweden’s High Coast, a UNESCO world heritage site. It’s where the glaciers from the last ice age were thickest – 3km tall! As the 3000 meters of ice (that’s almost the height of three Carrauntoohils) melted away, the land below began to “rebound”. This is known as isostasy– the crust of the earth lifting back up because of its buoyancy in the mantle.

As a result of this uplift – which is happening at about 1cm per year (!!) – there are old beaches halfway up mountains and there are ancient fishing villages kilometers away from the coast. The area has some impressive fault lines that were filled with sediment when they were under the sea but the softer sediment has since eroded away and all that is left are impressive crevasses like the famous Slåttdalsskrevan.

I spent my time on the High Coast exploring Skuleskogen National Park, which is pretty remote (especially at this time of year). A twenty-minute drive from the nearest town along snow-covered roads took me to the entrance of the park. It felt like a real wilderness. Over my entire trip I only saw four people. The only time I spoke to another human face-to-face was to say “hej” to these passing strangers. 

Apart from the rocky hills, thick forests of birch and pine cover the landscape. The woods were filled with birdsong and had levels of wildlife similar to a Disney film! Woodpecker drumming echoed through the valleys and red squirrels jumped from tree to tree above my head making weird squeaking noises. The snow made it really easy to follow tracks of animals like elk and deer and the area has a really healthy population of lynx. The bears were just waking up from hibernation as well, so I was extra careful..

There were vast areas of the park still covered in thick layers of snow! In the mornings I could skip over the snow because it was covered with an icy crust but in the afternoons, when the sun had been out all day, the snow had turned slushy and I would sink in as far as my hips. Because I didn’t bring any snowshoes or skis I had to be really careful about the routes I took.

The thick forests covered in snow made navigation a bit tricky. If I had been taking photographs of a subject for a while I would often forget where I was exactly so I had to use my compass to get me going in the right direction again.

On my last morning in the wilderness I got up at 2am to climb up to the highpoint of the wilderness area for sunrise. I stood at the summit of Slåttdalsberget looking towards the east as the sun rose over the Gulf of Bothnia. It was -4°C, with a serious wind-chill, and the moisture in my nose was freezing solid. A grouse flew over my head, the sunrise turned the clouds bright pink and the islands continued to rise slowly out of the ocean.