The upper river is less a channel than a chain of enormous lakes. Hornavan comes first among them, and it is a strange body of water: 221 metres deep, the deepest lake in Sweden, yet its surface sits 425 metres above sea level, so even the floor of it is still 204 metres up in the air. Below Hornavan lie Uddjaur and Storavan, shallower and broader, spread across the flat glacial country around the village of Arjeplog. In winter the whole system locks under ice for months at a time. In spring it releases, and the lakes do what engineers most want lakes to do — they hold the flood, then let it out slowly. Long before anyone built a dam here, the geology had already installed the reservoirs.

The first power station on the river, Finnfors, went up in 1906. Fourteen more followed — Rebnis, Sädva, Bergnäs, Slagnäs, Bastusel, Grytfors, Gallejaur, Vargfors, Rengård, Båtfors, Granfors, Krångfors, Selsfors, Kvistforsen — until the Skellefte produced about 4,241 gigawatt-hours in an average year. Tributaries feed the system along the way: Malån, Petikån, Finnforsån, Bjurån, Klintforsån. Something had to give for that, and what gave were the fish. Salmon and trout that once ran the river on their own are now stocked into it as compensation, and the river and its tributaries remain among the most popular fishing water in Norrland. It is an honest arrangement, if not a natural one — a river held to its old obligations by hatchery.

The name is older than almost anything written about the region. It appears as Skelepht in a document from 1327 and as Skellitta on the Carta marina, the great sixteenth-century chart of the north. What it means, nobody knows; the best guess is that it came from Sami, like most of the deep-map names up here, and that the original sense was lost before anyone thought to record it. The town at the river's mouth borrowed the name and then gave it back, so the water is now known by the settlement it passes through rather than the other way round. Skellefteå itself is young by Norrland standards — founded in 1845 by a vicar named Nils Nordlander, and home to roughly 36,000 people today, about fifteen kilometres inland from the open Bothnian Bay.

Water was never the only thing this valley produced. The bedrock south and west of the river holds one of Europe's richest sulphide ore belts, and Boliden AB has worked it for a century — around 1,200 employees, the largest private employer in Skellefteå, digging copper ore laced with gold, silver and platinum. The nickname stuck: Goldtown. When Northvolt chose Skellefteå in 2021 for an enormous battery plant, it looked like the same bargain renewed for the electric age, cheap hydropower married to northern metal. It did not hold. Layoffs came in September 2024 and bankruptcy followed in March 2025. The river kept turning its fifteen turbines regardless, which is the thing about infrastructure built to last a hundred years — it outlives the industries that justify it.