Okstindan is not one peak with attendants but a genuine alpine cluster, with nine named summits rising above 1,500 metres. Oksskolten leads at 1,916 metres, with Okshornet only fifteen metres behind at 1,901. Then the list steps down: Tvillingtindan at 1,824, Okstinden at 1,804, the southern Svartfjell at 1,749, Vesttinden at 1,711, Okskalvan at 1,646, Bessedørtinden at 1,562, Hekkelfjellet at 1,560.

What gives Oksskolten its authority is not the raw altitude so much as the drop beneath it. Its prominence — the vertical distance to the lowest saddle connecting it to anything higher — is 1,380 metres. In practical terms, the mountain rises out of its own landscape rather than perching on a plateau. From the Swedish fells to the east it reads as a single pale wall on the horizon, and the whiteness is not snow cover but ice: the glacier Okstindbreen fills the ground between these summits, and its arms reach into every valley the range provides.

Peder Stordal reached the summit of Oksskolten in 1883, the first person known to have done it — a local ascent in a decade when European mountaineering was busy with the Alps and had barely begun to look this far north.

That same era brought Charles Rabot to these glaciers. A French geographer, glaciologist, journalist and traveller who lived from 1856 to 1944, Rabot spent his working life in the Arctic: Spitsbergen, the Svartisen ice cap, the northern fells on both sides of the Scandinavian divide. In 1883 he made the first ascent of Kebnekaise, the highest mountain in Sweden. He kept coming back to Okstindan, and the region kept his name. In 2014 the Hemnes tourist association opened Rabothytta — a mountain hut at 1,200 metres, the highest in North Norway, designed by the Oslo firm Jarmund/Vigsnæs with 30 beds across six rooms and a sleeping loft. It opened to the public on 16 August 2014 as the Norwegian Trekking Association's five hundredth hut, a sharply modern building of angled timber sitting on bare rock above the north side of the ice.

There are two ordinary ways to start. One is the Leirskardalen valley; the other is the lake Kjennsvatnet. From the end of the Leirskardalen summer road at 650 metres, Rabothytta is 5.5 kilometres away and 520 metres up — an hour and a half to two hours for anyone reasonably fit, which is a modest price for a bed on the edge of a glacier.

Beyond the hut the terrain stops being forgiving. The route to Oksskolten crosses Okstindbreen, and glacier travel means rope, crevasse awareness, and a willingness to turn back. Whiteout is the ordinary hazard rather than the exceptional one: a flat overcast on an ice field removes the horizon, the shadows and any sense of slope at the same moment. Weather here changes on the timescale of an afternoon, and the massif makes its own.

Hemnes Municipality holds all of this with about 4,485 people spread across roughly 1,590 square kilometres. The administrative centre is Korgen, west of the mountains; Hemnesberget sits on the fjord. In Ume Sámi the municipality is Heäjmmanássja — a reminder that the reindeer-herding presence in this border country long predates the boundary that now cuts through it.

South of the range lies Røssvatnet, the second-largest lake in Norway at 219 square kilometres, a vast pale sheet that serves as the most reliable orientation feature for anyone flying or walking the region. From the Swedish side, the Okstindan skyline is visible across the border — one of those views that belongs to a country you are not standing in. Some of the best photographs of the range have always been taken from Sweden.