Kumaon · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
More than a hundred stone temples of the seventh to twelfth centuries standing together in a deodar grove on the Jataganga, with the Dandeshwar group a short walk downstream. The grove is temple property, which is why a stand of very old deodar survives in a district that lost most of its forest to the timber trade. Local tradition counts the shrine among the jyotirlingas, a claim other sites contest.
Best time: March–June and September–November.
The Katyuri capital's temple group on the Gomti, with a celebrated stone Parvati image in the main shrine. The dynasty's name for its seat, Kartikeyapura, survives only in inscriptions; the temples survive in the open, beside a river the town still bathes in.
A ninth-century sun temple on a ridge above the Kosi, oriented so that the early sun reaches the image, with more than forty subsidiary shrines around it. Its elaborately carved wooden doors were removed to a national collection after a theft, and the site is now quiet enough that visitors often have it to themselves.
The Bagnath temple at the meeting of the Saryu and Gomti, and the ground of the Uttarayani fair, which was the great trade meeting of the middle hills — Bhotiya wool and salt from above, plains cloth and metal from below. In January 1921 the fair became the site of the mass renunciation of coolie-begar, forced portering, when the registers were thrown into the river.
The Chand capital from the 1560s, laid along a saddle with a paved bazaar running the length of it and carved wooden doorways at first-floor level down both sides. The Nanda Devi temple in the town holds the region's biggest September fair, and the town's twentieth-century roster of visitors and residents is disproportionate for its size.
Best time: October–November and March–June.
A banj oak sanctuary on a ridge that was the Chand rajas' summer seat, with an unbroken view along something like 300 km of the Great Himalaya from Zero Point — Chaukhamba, Trishul, Nanda Devi, Nanda Kot and Panchachuli in one arc on a clear November morning.
Best time: October–November.
A ridge village above the Kosi valley facing the Trishul–Nanda Devi wall. Gandhi stayed here in 1929 and wrote part of his commentary on the Gita; the ashram that grew around the house is named for it. Sumitranandan Pant was born in the village.
Best time: October–November and March–May.
A lake in a tectonic hollow, developed as a hill station from the early 1840s and, from 1862, the summer seat of the North-Western Provinces' government. The Naina Devi temple at the head of the lake is a Shakti Peeth. The landslip of September 1880 killed more than 150 people and produced the flat ground now called the Flats — the town's playing field is the debris.
Best time: March–June and September–November.
A ridge at about 2,300 m with a Shiva temple at its crest, the cliffs called Chauli ki Jali below it, and a government veterinary research institute established here in the 1890s because the altitude and isolation suited the work.
A long forested cantonment on a ridge, the regimental centre of the Kumaon Regiment, with a golf course laid out in a natural saddle and pine and oak in every direction. The recruiting relationship between these hills and the infantry is one of the region's largest single economic facts.
The Chand dynasty's first capital, with the Baleshwar temple group in a fine early stone idiom. The valley below was the range of the Champawat man-eater, a tigress credited with 436 human deaths before she was shot in 1907.
The Varahi Devi temple where the Bagwal is fought each Shravan full moon between four khams, with cane shields and, formerly, stones. The stated object was to draw blood equivalent to one human life; the stones have been replaced with fruit and flowers in recent years by administrative direction.
A limestone cave near Gangolihat, entered by a narrow descending passage, in which the formations are identified with an entire pantheon and read in a fixed order by the attending priest. Numbers admitted at a time are limited by the width of the passage.
The shrines of a deified local ruler who judges. Petitioners write their case on judicial stamped paper and tie it up with the thousands already hanging; those whose matter is resolved return and hang a brass bell. Both sites are curtained in paper and metal, and both are entirely in current use.
A ridge town facing the five-peaked Panchachuli wall across the Gori valley, and the base of the Johar country whose Shauka families ran the Tibet trade and produced the Survey of India's Tibetan explorers. The Milam glacier lies a long walk up the valley, past villages that are still occupied only in summer.
Best time: April–June and September–November.
A wide green bowl of a valley — locally called a small Kashmir — with a Chand-era fort above it, and Askot above that, the old marchland seat whose name comes from the eighty forts it was said to command. This is the staging point for Darma, Byans and the Kailash Mansarovar route.
A peak and a lake in the Byans valley treated as a counterpart of Kailash on the Indian side of the crest, and a mountain face on which snow lodges in a pattern read as the syllable Om. Access is by permit and by a road that has only recently reached this far.
Best time: May–October.
Three glacier heads at the top of the Danpur valley, reached on foot from Loharkhet and Khati through oak, rhododendron and bugyal. The Pindar rises here and runs west — which is why the ridge above this valley is the boundary between two languages.
Best time: May–June and September–October.
India's first national park, established in 1936 in the Ramganga valley and renamed after Corbett in 1957. Sal forest, grassland chaurs and the reservoir together carry one of the densest tiger populations anywhere. The bhabar gravel below it is why the rivers here vanish and reappear.
Best time: November–June.
Jauljibi sits at the meeting of the Kali and the Gori and holds a November fair that was, for centuries, the exchange point between Bhotiya traders, hill farmers and Nepali merchants. Dharchula upstream is a town divided by the river, with its counterpart on the far bank, and the two halves have traded and intermarried for as long as anyone records.
Places worth visiting in Kumaon — heritage sites, wildlife, pilgrimage and landscape, with the best time to go. (20)