Qualla: Stora Blåsjön

Stora Blåsjön: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lundh, Gunnar, Public domain. In 1971, about twenty people in a village that had never held more than two hundred stopped eating. There was no employer to strike against, and that was precisely the grievance: a copper orebody lay under the Stekenjokk plateau a short drive up the road, and nobody had come to dig it. Meanwhile the young people of Frostviken were leaving for the coast. So Stora Blåsjön went on hunger strike against an absence. Sweden noticed. Forty years later the village threw a party to mark the anniversary.

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Image: Lundh, Gunnar | Public domain

Stora Blåsjön: The Argument That Worked

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lundholm, August, Public domain. Hunger strikes usually fail. This one did not. Mining began at Stekenjokk in 1976, and for a dozen years copper came out of one of the bleakest workplaces in the country — a plateau where the road tops out at 876 metres and the weather station recorded Sweden's coldest readings o...

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Image: Lundholm, August | Public domain

Stora Blåsjön: A Farmhand and a Settler's Son

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit {{{artist}}}, CC BY 2.5. Two men founded the place in 1799 — a farmhand who came over from Norway, whose border sits six kilometres west, and a settler's son from Jormvattnet down the valley. What drew them was land nobody else wanted: a shore at the head of a long lake, some 280 kilometres north of Öste...

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Image: {{{artist}}} | CC BY 2.5

Stora Blåsjön: The Road That Shuts

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lundh, Gunnar, Public domain. Vildmarksvägen, the Wilderness Way, runs 360 kilometres from Strömsund up through Gäddede, Jormvattnet and Stora Blåsjön, over Stekenjokk, then down to Klimpfjäll and Vilhelmina. Drivers arriving from the north meet the water before the houses, with the mountain Mesklumpen standi...

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Image: Lundh, Gunnar | Public domain

Stora Blåsjön: Six Kilometres of Marble

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lundholm, August, Public domain. Somewhere between Stora Blåsjön and Ankarvattnet, beneath the same road, lies Korallgrottan — the Coral Cave, the longest in Sweden. Six kilometres have been surveyed since its discovery in 1985, and it is cut through marble rather than the limestone that hosts most large cave sy...

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Image: Lundholm, August | Public domain

Stora Blåsjön: Hilda, Herbert and the Second Population

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lundholm, August, Public domain. In the middle of the village there is a moose farm. Mountain Moose runs guided visits to a small family herd headed by two animals named Hilda and Herbert, and it is exactly the sort of enterprise a community of seventy-eight invents in order to keep existing. There is also a sho...

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Image: Lundholm, August | Public domain