The bedrock, the type of soil and prevailing climate determine the development of vegetation, which in turn determines animal life. Everything living: animals, birds, insects down to the smallest organism, affect their surroundings as well. The clearest example, of course, is humans themselves. All the land in Norrbotten is affected directly or indirectly by human activities. The history that took place in the environment is not always very visible or evident to the beholder. The vestiges of human occupation are often hard to see or interpret.

When you look for a dry hill on which to put your tent, you are doing what generations before you have done. Where you put your tent may be the place where hunters from the Stone Age or reindeer herders from the 18th century had their settlements. The half hidden hearthstones reveal those who have been here before.

We want to show you the culture that you encounter in the landscape, a landscape where humans for thousands of years have left such discreet traces after them that they are nearly invisible. We want to show you the history that exists here in Norrbotten, to perceive the vestiges of those who have gone before us. We also want to show you nature which probably has no comparisons in Europe. It is a spectacular landscape with extensive areas without roads where plant and animal life are basically intact.

Most landscapes around us have been affected by humans in one way or another. Places that are totally untouched, or totally wilderness areas hardly exist, not even in the mountain area of Norrbotten which many refer to as "Europe's last wilderness area". Even the most remote mountain regions have been affected or used by people. In the entire mountain area there are many traces and remains from prehistoric people, i.e., from the hunting culture of the Stone Age people, the reindeer herding culture or early attempts at mining. The traces which the reindeer herding culture or the prehistoric hunters left behind are hard to discover, while the effect of industrialization, for example, has most often left larger scars on the land.

In other words, the landscape in Norrbotten is to a large degree a cultural landscape which mirrors many kinds of uses of nature, where people have either lived in close harmony with nature, as in the Sami culture, or where people have wanted to exploit nature as much as possible, as with hydroelectric power production.

The innumerable mountain brooks that gush down the mountainsides and are collected in the well-watered larger streams down in the mountain valleys give a good idea of what the climate is like in the summertime, cool and humid, often with abundant precipitation. Despite the harsh and inhospitable climate of the mountain chain, there are areas that display an enormous richness of species, especially where the soil is rich in lime.

The natural environment on the bare mountain region above the timberline consists of vast, treeless alpine heaths, often covered with different kinds of scrub and tussocks of short grass and sedges as well as willow and lush herbaceous vegetation and osier thickets on more humid soil. The landscape often consists of rocks and boulders in varying amounts and barren cliffs. High up on the mountaintops only lichens and mosses grow along with occasional clumps of the hardiest plants.

The forests right below the timberline most often consist of heaths with short birch thickets of knotty, windblown trees. This belt of birch forest, which is simply called "mountain birch forest", forms a narrow strip between the barren timberless mountaintops and the coniferous forests that covers most of the country. That the tree-line is made up of birch and not coniferous trees is unusual in the rest of the world, and it is only in Nordic countries and the Kamchatka Peninsula in North-eastern Siberia that this phenomenon occurs.