The park has a South Sami name as well as a Norwegian one: Njaarken vaarjelimmiedajve. This is not a courtesy label bolted on afterwards. Reindeer herding is explicitly protected inside the park regulations, which means the boundary was drawn around a working landscape rather than an empty one, and the rules were written to let that work continue. Archaeological sites within the park document human presence going back roughly nine thousand years — since not long after the ice withdrew. Whatever else Lomsdal–Visten is, it is not wilderness in the sense of land nobody ever used. It is land that has been used lightly and continuously for longer than most European countries have existed.

The park covers 1,102 square kilometres of Nordland county on the Helgeland coast, spilling across four municipalities — Brønnøy, Vevelstad, Vefsn and Grane. Its western edge reaches saltwater at narrow, steep-sided fjords including Velfjorden and Vefsnfjorden, where deciduous woodland runs almost to the tideline. Inland the ground climbs through conifer forest into open mountain. The Vistfjellan massif carries peaks to around 1,239 metres at Vistkjerringa, and the highest point in the park, Blåfjellet, reaches 1,292 metres. Broad valleys such as Eiterådalen and Svenningdalen cut through the granite, five watercourses inside the boundary hold permanent protection from development, and the Meheifossen falls drop through one of them. Almost none of it is served by roads.

All four of Norway's large carnivores are recorded within the park: brown bear, wolf, lynx and wolverine. That full set in one protected area is unusual, and it says something about how little this ground is travelled. Golden eagles and white-tailed sea eagles nest in the outer valleys where the land drops toward the fjords. Somewhere around forty-four threatened or vulnerable species live inside the park — not only the obvious birds and mammals but lichens and fungi that need old, undisturbed forest and stable humidity. Swans, divers and woodpeckers are all part of the roll. The fauna as a whole is considered strongly representative of Helgeland's bird and animal life, which was another argument for protection.

People farmed in these valleys and gave up. Abandoned holdings were cleared again between roughly 1500 and 1800, then abandoned again, leaving hay meadows that the forest has been reclaiming ever since; mountain smallholdings survive in various states inside the boundary, including a fjellgård on the Vefsn side. The Second World War left its own marks on the landscape. Park management now spends part of its effort on subtraction — removing Sitka spruce, an introduced conifer planted along the Norwegian coast for timber and shelter that spreads aggressively into native woodland. Protecting a place like this turns out to involve as much undoing as leaving alone.

The park replaced three earlier nature reserves — Skjørlægda, Laksmarkdalen and Strompdalen — and folded them into a single protected block. The visitor rules are short to the point of comedy. You may pick wild berries and mushrooms. Undue noise is prohibited. That second rule reads oddly for a landscape where the odds of meeting anyone are already slim, but it is the clearest statement of what Lomsdal–Visten is for. Development here is deliberately minimal, accommodation deliberately simple, and the promotional literature settled long ago on a name that gives the game away: the treasured land.