Gurdwara Sri Hemkunt Sahib stands at about 4,600 metres beside a glacial lake in Uttarakhand, reached by a nineteen-kilometre walk from Govindghat, and is open only from about May to October because it is under snow the rest of the year.
The identification rests on a passage in the Bachitra Natak describing a place of seven snow peaks where austerities were performed in a previous birth. The site was located in the 1930s by Sant Sohan Singh and others working from that description, and the gurdwara was built from 1960.
It draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims in a short season, many of them elderly, on a steep path at altitude, and the logistics and the environmental load on a fragile Himalayan valley are both serious.
The identification is accepted in practice and is not documented by anything older than the twentieth century, and that is worth stating plainly on a site about what is known.
It is the highest gurdwara in the world and the walk to it is, for a large number of Punjabi families, the most physically demanding thing anyone in the family has ever done.
The Valley of Flowers national park, a World Heritage site, is on the other fork of the same path above Govindghat, so the pilgrim route and one of the most protected botanical sites in the Himalaya share an approach, a bridge and a car park.
The 2013 Uttarakhand floods cut the road and the path and stranded thousands on the route, and the yatra was stopped. It has been stopped since by landslides, by weather and by the pandemic, and the approach has to be rebuilt after most bad seasons.
Everything on that mountain is carried up and carried down: the fuel, the food, the building material and the rubbish. Ponies and porters do all of it. A shrine at that height serving that many people for four months and then shut under snow is an operation of some scale and it is run from nothing every spring.