Nasafjäll had already broken one company. The mine's first period ran from 1635 to 1659, produced roughly 860 kilograms of silver and 250 tonnes of lead, and ended when a Norwegian raiding force burned its smelter at Silbojokk. A century later, investors tried again. A new company formed in 1770 and received its royal privileges on 17 February 1774. A smelter went up at Adolfsström that same year, and the first metal ran in the autumn of 1775. There was a plain reason not to rebuild on the old site: the pine forest around Sädvvájávrre had been cut out for charcoal during the first attempt and had not come back. So the ore came here instead, another day's haul east. The second period lasted until 1810 and yielded 110 kilograms of silver and 21 tonnes of lead. Thirty-five years of work, at the end of the world, for a weight of silver about equal to one large man.

Nobody sent the Sami down the mine. What the Crown did instead was conscript them, with their sleds and their reindeer, into hauling everything the works could not produce for itself - ore, timber, provisions - across sixty kilometres of mountain in a climate that punished animals and drivers alike. Many Sami families responded by leaving, moving west into Norway to get out from under the levy, which meant giving up grazing grounds their households depended on. During the first period the foreman Isak Tiock paid his workers in flour, salt, tobacco and liquor while embezzling the wages they were owed, and dealt harshly with anyone who refused the work; a royal commission eventually imprisoned him and saw the debts settled. Across both periods, everything Nasafjäll ever produced amounted to less than a tonne of silver.

When the mining stopped in 1810 the village stopped with it, and after the fire of 1821 there was hardly a village left to stop. For roughly two decades Adolfsström was simply an abandoned industrial site above the Arctic Circle, its foundations going quietly under moss and dwarf birch. Then in 1840 a settler named Jonas Lundmark arrived with his family and stayed, and everything the place is now grew from that one decision. Modernity turned up at a Lapland pace afterwards: a telephone line in 1922, mains electricity in 1947, and in 1960 a proper road you could drive. That road comes in from Laisvall and ends here. There is nowhere further to go by car, which is precisely the quality that made the village useful again.

Kungsleden passes Adolfsström on its long run between Ammarnäs and Jäkkvik, and this is the section that separates the committed from the curious. There are no Swedish Tourist Association huts across the roughly 130 kilometres between Kvikkjokk and Ammarnäs - the longest hut-free gap on a trail of some 467 kilometres. Walkers crossing it depend on the handful of villages scattered along the way, and Adolfsström is one of them. The Swedish description of the modern village is flat to the point of comedy: mainly a tourist place. What that means on the ground is cabins, a shoreline, and a trail coming through. It also means that a walker who has not seen a building for two days comes down off the fell, sees red-painted houses on the water, and feels something disproportionate about it. The silver is long gone. The village outlived it by two centuries, on the strength of being somewhere to arrive.