Fulufjället National Park () is a national park in central Sweden. Its total area is , located entirely within Älvdalen Municipality in the province of Dalarna. It is named after the mountain Fulufjället, high. It covers the Swedish part of the Fulufjället massif, which is the southernmost part of the Scandes in Sweden. The Norwegian part of the massif is protected by Norway's Fulufjellet National Park.
The park is one of Sweden's most recent, inaugurated in September 2002 by King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony attended by a few thousand spectators. The park has become one of the initial PAN Parks, an international project to combine preservation with tourism.
The Fulufjället massif is a high plateau deeply gouged by several rivers that flow into the mighty river Dalälven, which, far downstream, creates the unique topography of Färnebofjärden National Park. The geography is dominated by lichen, bare mountains, and valleys with dense old-growth forest. The heaths of brush, grass and lichens are unique in the Scandinavian Mountains, a result of the absence of grazing reindeers.
The park is a notable location for several species of birds, as well as brown bears and Eurasian lynx. The bold Siberian jay is the park's symbol. Notable sights include Sweden's largest waterfall, Njupeskär, with a total height of , and a free fall of . Growing in the park is the Old Tjikko, one of the world's oldest trees.
Toponymy The origin of the name is not known for certain: the suffix -fjället means "the mountain", but the first part (Fulu-) is not clear.p. 50 In Ortnamn i Dalarna, Harry Ståhl suggests that this word comes from the Old Swedish fala meaning "pale" or "dim", like the names of the city of Falun and of the river Fulan. The mountain would have thus taken its name from the nearby river, or else from the city: a former road going from Trysil to Falun would indeed have gone over the mountain, and might therefore have been called "the mountain on Falun's road".
Geography
Location and borders Fulufjället National Park is in Älvdalen Municipality in Dalarna County, southwest of Särna.p. 5 It extends along the Norwegian frontier over more than (which is ). It borders, on the other side of this national frontier, Fulufjellet National Park, which has an area of more than . It is relatively far from the large cities of the country, Stockholm being about away; the nearest railway station and airport are at Mora, from the park.p. 54
Topology
The park covers most of the Fulufjället massif (called Fulufjellet in Norwegian), which is long, and which spans the border between Sweden and Norway, so that a small southwestern part of it is in Norway.p. 31 This massif makes up part of the Transtrandsfjällen, which is the southernmost part of the Scandes in Sweden.p. 11 Fulufjället is a plateau of an altitude between with some round peaks. Slottet, in altitude, the highest point of the massif, is in Norway. On the Swedish side, in Fulufjället National Park, the highest point is Brattfjället at , followed close behind by Storhön at .p. 20 At the southern and eastern extremities of the massif, the altitude drops brutally, about to the valley of Fuluälven. The plateau is gouged by several valleys, facing west (Bergådalen, Girådalen), south (Tangådalen) and east (Göljådalen).
Climate Fulufjället is one of the parts of Scandinavia farthest from the sea. It therefore possesses a continental climate.p. 12 The average temperature in the park is about 1 °C, with relatively high rainfall ( per year on average). The weather survey at nearby Särna gives an indication; but, being situated in a valley, its climate is drier. Although winter is drier than summer, the snow cover typically persists for 175 to 200 days each year.
However, Fulufjället's weather is very variable over time and space, both in terms of temperature and precipitation.p. 15 In particular, the area experienced an extreme storm the night of 30–31 August 1997. At the lakes of Rösjöarna, of rain were collected in and the rainfall is estimated at 300 to further south. This was the largest amount of rain in a 24-hour period ever recorded in Sweden. There was significant damage in the park, in particular along the streams, the banks of which were violently eroded, ripping out all the vegetation there.
Hydrography
Many rivers have their source on the Fulufjället massif, the principal ones being the Tangån (1.5 m3⋅s−1), the Girån, the Bergån, the Fulubågan, the Stora Njupån, and the Stora Göljån (0.4 m3⋅s−1).p. 24p. 15 The first three feed the river Görälven, which runs along the Fulufjället massif to the west, while the last three feed the river Fulan (also called Fuluälven), which runs along the massif to the east. The meeting of the Görälven and Fulan gives birth to the Västerdal River, which itself forms the great river Dalälven. One of the park's streams, Njupån, forms to the north of the plateau the waterfall Njupeskär, with a height of of which are free-fall, making it the highest waterfall in Sweden. The plateau, and in particular its southern part of less sharp topology, includes several important lakes, such as the Stora Rösjön (), Stora and Lilla Harrsjön (), Stora Getsjön (), etc.p. 26 These lakes are most often shallow and the abundance of precipitation refills them rapidly. This zone also includes many bogs with a total area of more than ,p. 8 which is relatively little compared to the surrounding mountains.p. 23
Geology Rock The Fulufjället massif is mostly sandstone.p. 25 The sandstone was formed 900 million years ago, when this part of the Baltic tectonic plate was located near the equator.p. 27 The climatic conditions there were thus desertic and the wind blew huge quantities of sand from the dunes into the ocean. These sediments were compacted at the bottom of the ocean and formed rock, specifically sandstone, in horizontal strata. This structure has been conserved, since it was little affected by the Caledonian orogeny.
This sandstone formation is very different from the rock one typically finds in Sweden (granite and gneiss). It is also very different from the rest of the Scandes, which are part of the Caledonian orogen. This sandstone is called the Dalecarlian sandstone, or the sandstone of Trysil on the Norwegian side. It constitutes the largest sandstone area in Sweden and reaches a thickness of . The sandstone is usually reddish, but can also be gray, yellow, or brown.
At Fulufjället, the sandstone is veined with diabase. This diabase is particularly important in the area, since it forms a much richer substrate than sandstone for vegetation. Additionally, it resists erosion better than sandstone and therefore forms prominent structures in the countryside. For example, the peak Brattfjället, highest zone in the park, is situated in one of the largest diabase zones. The diabase is a little less than 300 million years old, which corresponds to the formation of the Oslo Rift. This suggests that these diabases are connected to that rifting event.
Formation of the countryside The same forces that created the rest of the Scandes also created Fulufjället. Indeed, from about 60 million years ago, the west coast of Scandinavia and the northeast coast of the Americas underwent an important tectonic uplift. The causes of this phenomenon are not clear and many hypotheses have been proposed. One of these hypotheses is the lifting of the Earth's crust by the Iceland hotspot. Another hypothesis is isostasy connected to glaciation. This elevation seems to have been connected to different periods in the north and south of the Scandes, with the middle, between Trondheim and Östersund, a little depressed. In any case, this uplift allowed the formation of a vast flat zone several thousand meters high.
This area then underwent intense erosion, giving the countryside the shape one sees today. However, unlike the southernmost sections of the Scandes, such as those around Sarek National Park, the countryside around Fulufjället is not particularly marked by glacial erosion. Indeed, even at the height of glaciation during the Quaternary period, when the mountain was covered by an ice sheet, the movement of the ice was feeble, and did not significantly erode the massif.p. 35 Instead, the most marked erosion took place during the Tertiary period, entirely under a tropical climate.
Environment The park is situated in the WWF terrestrial ecoregion Scandinavian and Russian taiga, even though a significant portion is situated above the treeline, and therefore becomes more like the Scandinavian Montane Birch forest and grasslands ecoregion.
The plateau
Because of the weather and the poverty of the soil, the plateau is mostly heath and bare dirt with only a few common juniper shrubs and some moor birches.p. 12 The principal vascular plants one encounters are snowbed willow, Alpine bearberry, Alpine hawkweed, crowberry, cowberry, blue whortleberry and alpine azalea.p. 36p. 20 But that which renders the vegetation of the Fulufjället plateau particularly unique in Sweden is its richness in lichens, with in particular the vast carpets of reindeer lichen and of fönsterlav, not affected there by the pasture of domestic reindeer, unlike most of the Swedish mountains. It is also in these inaccessible areas that one finds Old Tjikko, a Norway spruce old, making it one of the oldest trees in the world.
Few animals live in these areas; birds, mostly, such as the willow warbler, the meadow pipit, the northern wheatear, and these rarer ones: the European golden plover, the Eurasian dotterel, the snow bunting, and the Lapland longspur.p. 29 The willow ptarmigan is relatively common, whereas the rock ptarmigan is found only on the highest peaks. For many of these species, Fulufjället is the southernmost part of their range in Sweden.p. 151
Valleys and mountainside
In the valleys and on the mountainside, in contrast, the diabase and the better weather permit a richer vegetation. In particular, these areas are blanketed in forest, with the plant species varying with altitude: moor birch, Scots pine and Norway spruce cover , and , respectively. The undergrowth also presents great diversity in plant life. To wit, the south-facing slopes are principally covered in Scots pines and their undergrowth strongly resembles heath, with in particular common heather and crowberry.p. 22 The rest of the coniferous forests include most often whortleberry, northern oak fern, woundwort, and common cow-wheat. The soil rich in diabase allows the growth of more demanding plants, such as Alpine blue-sow-thistle, wood cranesbill and northern wolfsbane. These zones also have a great number of species of moss; the park has more than a third of all the species of moss in the country.