Kedarnath stands in the upper Mandakini valley in Rudraprayag district of Uttarakhand, at roughly 3,580 m, and no road reaches it — the last stretch is walked or ridden up from Gaurikund. It is the highest and hardest to reach of the twelve, and the only one that keeps a season: snow closes the approach for about half the year, and the processional deity is carried down to the Omkareshwar temple at Ukhimath (a Garhwal shrine of the same name, not the jyotirlinga on the Narmada) and worshipped there through the winter. What is worshipped in the sanctum is an irregular conical rock rather than a carved lingam, which the Panch Kedar tradition of Garhwal explains as the hump of the buffalo form Shiva took to evade the Pandavas. Kedarnath is also the Shiva shrine of Uttarakhand's Chota Char Dham circuit, which is a separate enumeration and is not encoded here.

Claims, and where they come from

• Kedara in the Himalaya is one of the twelve jyotirlingas, fifth in the order this set follows. — Shiva Purana — Koti Rudra Samhita, ch. 1 — the dvadasha-jyotirlinga list
• The sages Nara and Narayana performed austerities in the Himalaya, worshipping Shiva in a lingam of earth, and asked when he appeared that he remain there rather than depart; he stayed as Kedareshvara. — Shiva Purana — The Kedareshvara account. Some retellings place the sages' austerities at Badarikashrama rather than at Kedara itself, so the samhita is deliberately not pinned here
• Seeking release from the killing of their kinsmen and teachers after Kurukshetra, the Pandavas pursued Shiva into the Himalaya; he evaded them at Guptkashi, then took the form of a buffalo among a herd at Kedarnath and began to sink into the ground, and Bhima seized the hump, which is what remains and is worshipped here. Four other parts of the form are held to have surfaced at Tungnath, Rudranath, Madhyamaheshwar and Kalpeshwar — the Panch Kedar. — Garhwali sthala-purana (Panch Kedar tradition) — Commonly associated with the Kedarkhand, a section attached to the Skanda Purana, but carried chiefly by regional tradition. It is not the Mahabharata's own account of the Pandavas' end, and this corpus records it as regional tradition rather than as a claim of the epic; retellings also differ on which part of the form surfaced where
• The shrine is closed through the winter and its processional deity is taken down to the Omkareshwar temple at Ukhimath; the opening date is announced there on Mahashivaratri, the portals open in late April or May, and the shrine closes on Bhai Dooj after Diwali. — Shri Badarinath–Shri Kedarnath Temple Committee (administrative practice) — Current practice of the committee that administers the shrine, not a scriptural claim
• In June 2013 heavy rain and the breach of a glacial lake above the valley destroyed much of the settlement around the temple, with great loss of life across Uttarakhand; the temple itself survived structurally, and a boulder lodged behind it — popularly the Bhim Shila — is widely credited with splitting the flow. — Recorded modern event (June 2013 Uttarakhand floods) — Modern record, not scripture. The reading of the boulder as divine protection is how the event is understood in popular and devotional accounts; this corpus reports that reading rather than asserting it

Counted among

• The Twelve Jyotirlingas — Twelve places where Shiva is worshipped not as an image but as a pillar of light with no beginning and no end.

Questions to explore

• Kedarnath is worshipped as a rock the tradition calls the hump of a buffalo, not as a lingam anyone carved. How does that square with the idea of a jyotirlinga as a pillar of light?
• The Panch Kedar story makes five shrines into one body, and the Mahabharata never sends the Pandavas there at all. How did Garhwal come to attach the brothers to these particular valleys?
• For half the year the deity is at Ukhimath and the temple is under snow. Is the tirtha the place, the image, or the season?