The settlement locals simply call Bakken sits about eight kilometres south of Sulitjelma, on high ground above the southern shore of Langvatnet. Six hundred metres is not a great height by alpine standards, but at 67 degrees north it puts you above the birch and into open fell — bare rock, heather, meltwater, and snow that lingers into July. County road 543 climbs to Jakobsbakken and then simply ends. To the east the border massif builds toward Suliskongen at 1,908 metres, and two glaciers, the Sulitjelma icefield and Blåmannsisen, sit within walking distance of anyone determined enough. Winter here is long and genuinely dark. The reason a village existed at all in such a position was the rock underneath it.

Ore was found on this slope in the mid-1870s, though nobody surveyed it properly until 1886. That was the year the Swedish industrialist Nils Persson began acquiring claims across the Sulitjelma area — eight of them in all — and in 1891 the company Sulitjelma Gruber was formed to work them. Jakobsbakken turned out to be the prize. It was by far the richest single deposit in the entire Sulitjelma field, and geologists have since identified at least twenty-three distinct ore minerals in the ground here. The mine ran from 1896 to 1968. Across those seventy-two years it produced 4.47 million tonnes of copper and zinc ore, hauled out by men working a scraping method that the mining museum down in Fagerli still illustrates with a model built in 1932.

Getting ore off a mountain above the tree line is a problem with no elegant solutions, and the company chose an aerial tramway. Loaded buckets swung down the slope on cables to Sulitjelma, where the smelters and the railway waited, and empty ones came back up the same wire. In summer the line ran over rock and standing water. In winter it ran through weather that could close the footpath for days. Everything else came up the same way or on men's backs: flour, coal, timber, schoolbooks, coffins. The people who worked here were the same mixed Arctic workforce that filled the whole Sulitjelma field — Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Kven and Sámi — living under a company that owned their houses, their shop and their road, and whose conditions down in the valley were harsh enough to produce Norway's most famous mining strike.

For decades this was not an outpost but a proper community, and the details of ordinary life are what make it land. Children walked to a school on the fell. Adults met in an assembly hall. There was a shop, which meant there were arguments about the shop. Families kept animals to stretch what wages would buy. Marriages, births and funerals all happened at 600 metres, in a place where the nearest doctor was a long trip downhill and the nearest town most of a day away. It is worth holding that in mind when looking at the empty houses: they were not a work camp, they were addresses.

When the mine closed in 1968, the two halves of Jakobsbakken went separate ways. The industrial half was demolished or walled up, its adits sealed and its headframes taken down. The residential half was bought by the Norwegian Lutheran Mission, which is why the village never rotted into ruins the way abandoned mining settlements usually do. Today it operates as Jakobsbakken Fjellsenter, a mountain and camp centre where children come for a week at a time to the same buildings that once housed shift workers. Cross-country skiers arrive for the annual Kobberløpet — the Copper Race — and hikers use the village as a jumping-off point into the fells and glaciers along the Swedish border. The population figure is still zero. The place is anything but empty.