What strikes you first is how naked it all is. The ice sheets scoured this bedrock smooth and then left it, so whole hillsides read as bare grey domes, glossy where meltwater still runs over them, littered with granite boulders dropped exactly where the ice happened to be when it stopped. Soil is thin and poor. The climate is harsh even by Nordland standards. Between them they hold the plant life down to a short list — pine on the lower slopes, alpine species scattered through the woods and above them, and not much else. Several small glaciers survive in the southeastern corner. There is nothing lush here, and the effect is the opposite of bleak: with so little vegetation to soften it, the shape of the landscape itself is exposed, every fold and scratch of the last glaciation still legible.

One marked route runs northeast into the heart of the park, up the valley called Storskogdalen, with the Nordfjordelva below and pine-covered slopes rising into vertical cliff faces on either side. Beyond Storskogvatnet the valley changes character and name, becoming Trolldalen. The water is the show. Litlverivassforsen drops 223 metres out of the lake Litlverivatnet into Storskogdalen — a fall of a scale you would expect to find on a tourist itinerary rather than at the end of a day's walk from the nearest road. Along Storskogelva there are three more worth stopping for: Klipforsen, Storforsen, Helligforsen. In late spring, when the snowfields let go all at once, the whole valley is loud.

The park's entire built infrastructure amounts to five huts. Two stand at Storskogvatnet, one at the eastern end of Litlverivatnet, one is a reindeer herder's cabin at Ragovatnan, and one sits near the Swedish border. Bunk space is limited enough that walkers are advised to bring a tent regardless of what the map promises. That thinness of provision is deliberate and it defines the experience: Rago is not a park you visit so much as one you cross, and it rewards people who arrive self-sufficient. The reindeer cabin is a reminder of who was working this country long before it was designated — Sami herders, whose semi-domesticated animals still move through the park on ranges that predate every line drawn on the map.

Rago's animal life is as short a list as its plant life, and for the same reasons. Moose come up into the valleys. Semi-domesticated reindeer graze the higher ground. Wolverines hold territory here, which says a good deal about how little the place is disturbed — the wolverine is the animal that tends to survive precisely where people find travel difficult. Willow grouse are common, and golden eagles are seen often enough to be expected rather than remarkable. Brown bears used to be part of this fauna and were still numerous in the Swedish parks across the border, but they have not been regular residents on the Norwegian side since around 1900. Their absence is the one hole in an otherwise intact northern ecosystem.

For a park of 171 square kilometres, Rago punches far above its area, because of what lies immediately east of it. On the Swedish side it abuts Padjelanta, and beyond Padjelanta lie Sarek and Stora Sjöfallet. Taken together the block of protected land runs to something over 5,000 square kilometres of continuous wilderness — one of the largest such areas anywhere in Europe. The national frontier runs straight through the middle of it and means nothing at all to the wolverines, the eagles, the meltwater, or the herds. Rago is the Norwegian doorway into that country, and the smallest, hardest, least-visited part of it.