The last six kilometres take most people four or five hours. The path leaves the flower meadows behind and turns to switchbacks cut into rock, the air thins to the point where conversation stops, and then, quite suddenly, the ridge opens and there is a lake — black-green, absolutely still, ringed by seven snow peaks with a Nishan Sahib planted on each of them, and a white gurdwara standing on its shore. This is Hemkund Sahib, at about 4,632 metres, roughly 15,200 feet, in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand: the highest gurdwara in the world, open for barely four months of the year, and reachable only on foot, on pony, or by a helicopter that can turn back for weather at any moment.

A Place Named Before It Was Found

Hemkund is unusual among Sikh shrines because the place was written about long before anyone identified it on a map.

In the Bachitra Natak, the autobiographical composition attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, the Guru describes a previous existence spent in meditation at a mountain called Hemkunt — a place, in his description, adorned with seven snow peaks, where Pandu is said to have practised austerities, and where he himself meditated on the Divine so intently that he became one with it before being sent into the world for a purpose. The name itself is transparent: hem is snow, kund is a bowl or pool. A pool of snow, held in a ring of white summits.

For two centuries that was all there was. The passage was recited, and the location was unknown. Sikh scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, working through the geography implied by the text and through Puranic references to a lake called Lokpal associated with Lakshman, began arguing that the place ought to be findable in the Garhwal Himalaya.

The identification is credited to Sant Sohan Singh, who searched the Garhwal ranges in the early twentieth century, guided by the description of seven peaks and by local knowledge of a high lake beside the Lakshman shrine at Lokpal. He was joined by a retired army havildar, Modan Singh, who had come to the same conclusion independently and who put up money and labour for construction.

A small stone structure roughly ten feet square was built beside the lake in the mid-1930s, completed around 1936 — a remarkable undertaking given that every stone had to be worked on site and everything else carried up on a man's back. Pilgrimage began almost immediately and grew steadily, and the modest shed was eventually replaced by the larger star-shaped gurdwara that stands there now, built over several decades in the later twentieth century to a design intended to shed snow and survive the winter unattended.

It should be said plainly that the identification of this particular lake with the Hemkunt of the Bachitra Natak rests on textual interpretation rather than on any documentary record, and that some scholars have questioned it. That debate exists. It has had almost no effect on the pilgrimage, which is now among the most significant in Sikhism.

The Climb

The route is one of the great walks of the Himalaya, and it is not a gentle one.

Pilgrims reach Govindghat, on the Alaknanda in Chamoli district, by road from Rishikesh or Haridwar. From there a trail of about thirteen kilometres climbs the Lakshman Ganga valley to the village of Ghangaria at around 3,050 metres, where almost everyone spends the night. The final ascent from Ghangaria is six kilometres and more than a thousand vertical metres, and it is relentlessly steep. Most people start before dawn to be at the lake by mid-morning and back down before the afternoon weather closes in.

The shrine opens around late May, when the army and the gurdwara committee have cleared the snow from the path, and closes in early October before the winter seals it. Snowfall can bury the gurdwara to its roof; the building is left empty and the sacred texts are taken down to Ghangaria for the season.

Alongside the gurdwara at the lake stands the Lokpal temple to Lakshman, and the two shrines share the site without difficulty — a small, ordinary fact that says something about how these mountains have always been used.

At the lake, pilgrims bathe. The water comes off glaciers and it is, by every account, shocking beyond description. People go in for a few seconds, recite the Japji Sahib on the shore, take the karah prashad, and drink hot tea from the langar that operates at that altitude with volunteers who have carried the flour up themselves.

Flowers on the Way

The path from Ghangaria forks. One branch climbs to Hemkund. The other leads into the Valley of Flowers, an alpine meadow that erupts in the monsoon into one of the densest displays of wildflowers in the Himalaya, and which forms part of the Nanda Devi and Valley of Flowers National Parks inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site. Many pilgrims do both, and the contrast — a soft valley of blue poppies and a hard climb to black water — is a large part of why the journey is remembered the way it is.

What the Pilgrimage Asks

Hemkund is different in kind from the great shrines of the plains. There is no city around it, no market, no continuous congregation. The Golden Temple can be reached at three in the morning by anyone; Hemkund can be reached only by people willing to walk nineteen kilometres uphill in a narrow window of the year, and only while the weather permits it.

That difficulty is not incidental. The pilgrimage attracts the very young and the very old in numbers that alarm the doctors stationed along the route; altitude sickness is common and the volunteer medical posts are busy. Every year there are people carried up on the backs of porters because they have decided that they are going, and every year the region's flash floods and landslides — the 2013 Uttarakhand disaster stranded thousands on this route — make plain how conditional the access is.

What pilgrims describe, almost uniformly, is the silence at the top. A lake that does not move, seven peaks holding it, and the sense of standing in a place that was described in a Guru's verse long before anyone knew where to look for it.