These four shrines are seasonal, and the seasonality is not an inconvenience around the ritual but part of it. The temples open around Akshaya Tritiya in April or May and close after Diwali, at Bhai Dooj, and for roughly six months they are shut, snowbound and unattended.
The deities do not stay. They are carried down to lower temples, their winter seats, and worship continues there without interruption. Kedarnath's image goes to Ukhimath, Badrinath's worship moves to Joshimath, Gangotri's goddess goes to Mukhba and Yamunotri's to Kharsali. The descent and the return are processions in their own right, accompanied by the local community, and the villages of the winter seats hold a formal relationship to the high shrines through them.
At Badrinath a lamp is left burning inside the closed temple, tended and filled before the doors are sealed, and its condition when the doors are reopened in spring is watched. At Kedarnath the same practice is reported.
The order of the circuit is fixed and follows a logic. Yamunotri and Gangotri are the sources of the Yamuna and the Ganga, so the pilgrim begins at water, then goes to Kedarnath, a Shiva jyotirlinga at 3,583 metres, and ends at Badrinath, a Vishnu temple and one of the hundred and eight Divya Desams.
In June 2013 catastrophic floods struck the Kedarnath valley and killed thousands of pilgrims and residents. The temple itself survived, protected in the accounts by a large boulder that lodged behind it and split the flow. The reconstruction of the town and the subsequent expansion of helicopter access and road building have changed the character of the yatra considerably.