Stekenjokk straddles a county line, belonging partly to Strömsund Municipality in Jämtland and partly to Vilhelmina Municipality in Västerbotten, a few kilometres from the Norwegian border and Børgefjell National Park beyond it. The name is half Sami: jokk means watercourse. This is bare fell, a subarctic climate too cold to grow trees, and the emptiness is the point. There is no precipitation gauge at the SMHI station, but Gäddede, lower down and not far away, takes more rain and snow than the Swedish average, and Stekenjokk's winters run cold and long enough that the snowpack lingers into early summer. Drifts of six or seven metres are ordinary. The nearest municipal seats give a sense of the isolation: Vilhelmina is 130 kilometres away by road, Strömsund 180.

The plateau also held one of Sweden's more remote industrial gambles. Parliament debated state support for opening a mine at Stekenjokk in 1973, preparatory work began that summer, and Boliden brought the underground operation into production in 1976. It ran until October 1988. Over those twelve years roughly seven million tonnes of ore came out of the rock, carrying about 1.5 per cent copper, 3 per cent zinc and some 50 grams of silver per tonne. Around 170 people worked there at the peak. The ore was concentrated on site, trucked down to Lövliden and put on rail for the Rönnskär smelter on the coast. Then the world copper price fell far enough that the numbers stopped working, and Boliden shut the mine. What the company left behind was a scar on bare fell at high altitude, where almost nothing grows back on its own.

Restoring ground like this is slow, unglamorous work. In 2020 Boliden and the consultancy Ecogain took a five-hectare patch of the old site and tried a five-step recipe on it. Sewage sludge mixed with wood chips went down about two centimetres deep, to release nutrients over several years rather than all at once. An excavator loosened the surface, creating pockets sheltered enough for seed to germinate in a place where the wind is the main enemy. Seed was sown by hand, then rolled in so the wind could not simply take it away. Finally came dwarf birch seedlings, grown from seed collected locally. One choice reveals who the land belongs to: the knotweed seed used makes good reindeer grazing, which the Sami communities here value. The methods worked; the cold summers made ripening seed on site the hardest part.

Stekenjokk is summer pasture. Reindeer from Vilhelmina södra sameby graze the moor through the warm months, and the herding work itself is part of what visitors come to see. The plateau is a bird protection area and a Sami cultural landscape, and it carries rules to match; in 2012 the reserve was closed to the public for months after thieves took eggs from nests, reopening only once the birds had a chance to lay again. That balance is now under pressure. Bluelake Mineral, formerly Vilhelmina Mineral, has pursued reopening since 2017. Sweden's mining inspectorate said no in October 2024, the company appealed, and in May 2026 the government granted the processing concession, rejecting objections from the Vilhelmina södra and Voernese Sami communities. Mining is restricted to November through April, on the reasoning that the reindeer are elsewhere then. Vilhelmina södra maintains it has reindeer in the area year-round. An environmental permit from the land and environment court is still required.

Vildmarksvägen, the Wilderness Road, runs 360 kilometres from Strömsund to Vilhelmina by way of Gäddede, Jormvattnet, Stora Blåsjön, Stekenjokk, Klimpfjäll, Kultsjön and Saxnäs, and locals call its high section Stekenjokkvägen after the pass. Climbing to roughly 870 metres, it is among the highest public roads in Sweden and arguably the highest paved one. The plateau stretch opens on 6 June and closes on 15 October; for the remaining seven and a half months the snow simply wins. Concrete bunkers built between 1940 and 1945 sit along the route, poured when Sweden expected a German advance from Norway. Drive it in July and the fell runs green and open to the horizon in every direction, with reindeer on the road and the old mine road branching off into the emptiness.