Syterskalet–Viterskalet divides the range almost exactly in half. It is a textbook U-shaped valley, gouged by ice into a profile so symmetrical that it looks designed — steep walls, flat floor, and a straight line of sight from one end to the other. Swedes compare it to Lapporten, the famous glacial notch in the far north near Abisko, and the comparison is meant as a compliment to both.

Walking it is the main event. Kungsleden runs straight through Syterskalet, which means that anyone finishing the trail's southern section passes between these walls in their last days on the route. The scale is hard to read from inside: the valley floor is broad enough that the enclosing slopes seem gentler than they are, and the far end never appears to get closer. This is one of the icons of the reserve, and it earns the status without any single dramatic feature — just proportion, repeated for kilometre after kilometre.

Norra Sytertoppen tops out at 1,768 metres, and nothing else in Västerbotten County stands higher. Its neighbour Södra Sytertoppen rises on the other side of the same shoulder, so that photographs of the pair — one in the foreground, one behind — have become the standard portrait of the range. Måskostjakke completes the trio of named peaks.

These are fells rather than alpine spires. The rock is old and rounded, the summits are broad, and snow lies in the north-facing hollows deep into summer. That geometry has consequences on the ground: what looks like an easy walk from a distance turns into hours of boulder-hopping across fields of frost-shattered stone. Weather changes fast at this latitude and altitude, and there is no timberline shelter above the birch zone. The reward for the effort is a view that runs from Norwegian border peaks in the west to the lake country stretching east until it dissolves in haze.

Sameblod, Amanda Kernell's 2016 debut feature, was the first film funded by the International Sámi Film Institute. It follows Elle-Marja, a Sámi girl sent to a nomad boarding school, where the pupils are taught in a system built on the premise that they are unsuited to Swedish life and should be kept apart from it. Researchers from the State Institute for Racial Biology arrive to measure the children's skulls and photograph their bodies. Elle-Marja responds by taking a Swedish name, leaving for Uppsala, and spending the rest of her life at a distance from everything she came from.

The story is fiction; the school system, the institute and the measurements were not. Kernell filmed in Tärnaby and Hemavan, at the foot of the range whose name she had already borrowed for the short. The film won the Lux Prize in 2017, the Dragon Award at Göteborg, and Best Actress at Tokyo. It is worth knowing before you walk here that the fells in the background of those scenes are not scenery to the families who have always lived among them, and that within living memory the Swedish state treated the children of those families as specimens.

Most of Norra Storfjället lies within Vindelfjällen, which covers 5,628 square kilometres — the largest nature reserve in Sweden and one of the largest protected areas in Europe. It was created in 1974 and extended in 1988 to take in stands of primary coniferous forest that had never been logged.

The reserve holds arctic fox, a species now critically endangered in Sweden and clinging to exactly this kind of high, cold, undisturbed ground. Wolverine, brown bear, lynx, moose and beaver share the range, and more than 120 bird species nest in the reserve, with the Marsivagge valley among the richest areas. It is also working land. More than 20,000 domesticated reindeer graze the western section, herded by Sámi communities across three *samebyar*, and maintaining that herding is one of the reserve's stated purposes rather than an exception to it. Protection here does not mean the absence of people. It means the continuation of a use older than the county.