Adi Kailash and Om Parvat: the road journey

The single thing most sites get wrong

Read four travel pages about this journey and you will come away thinking Adi Kailash and Om Parvat are the same viewpoint, or two names for one mountain, or a single stop on a single road. They are not, and the confusion is close to universal in this niche.

They are two separate destinations reached by two separate roads that fork at Gunji. Almost every itinerary does both — which is exactly why packages are sold as “Adi Kailash and Om Parvat” — but they are two different day excursions from a base at Gunji, in two different directions, on two different days.

If a quoted itinerary shows Om Parvat and Adi Kailash on the same afternoon, whoever wrote it has not driven the road. Plan a night at Gunji and two separate excursions from it. The stage-by-stage route guide lays the whole corridor out in order.

What Adi Kailash is

Adi Kailash — also called Chota Kailash, Shiva Kailash, Baba Kailash and Jonglingkong Peak — is the second of the Panch Kailash, regarded in Hindu tradition as a mirror of Mount Kailash in Tibet and associated with Shiva and Parvati. It stands above Jolingkong at the head of the Kuti valley, with Parvati Sarovar at its foot.

Its height is a genuinely unsettled number, and we would rather show you the spread than pick one and pretend. Approximately 5,945 m, with sources ranging from 5,925 m to 6,191 m. PeakVisor gives 5,945 m, Wikipedia 5,925 m, and the Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam’s own 2018 brochure 6,191 m. The Pithoragarh district site’s figure of “approximately 4,700 m” is really describing the base area at Jolingkong, not the summit.

It has never been summited. Attempts are reported to have stopped short — one of them around 200 m below the top.

What Om Parvat is

Om Parvat is a peak of 5,590 m (18,340 ft) on which snow lying in the rock crevices forms the shape of the syllable Om, ॐ, and is revered as a sign of Shiva’s presence. It is viewed from the camp at Nabhidhang, west of the KMVN huts, on the old Kailash Mansarovar route toward Lipulekh.

The route, in summary

From the Kathgodam railhead the line runs:

Kathgodam → Pithoragarh → Dharchula → Tawaghat → Ghatiabagarh → Malpa → Budhi → Chhiyalekh → Garbyang / Nabi → Gunji, and then the fork described above.

Kathgodam to Adi Kailash comes to roughly 400 to 430 km one way. We will not publish a single hard number for it, because the total genuinely depends on which Kathgodam–Pithoragarh road is used — via Almora, or via Tanakpur and Lohaghat — and the published leg figures do not all agree. The Kathgodam to Adi Kailash taxi page breaks the drive into real days.

One correction worth making here, because it appears in a lot of itineraries: Narayan Ashram is not on the main road to Gunji. It sits at 2,734 m, about 14 km from Tawaghat on a side road. It is a worthwhile detour, usually taken on the return leg, but it is not a waypoint you pass through.

Altitudes, with the disagreements shown

What the BRO road changed

Until recently this was a trek. It is now a drive, and the clearest way to see the scale of the change is in the state corporation’s own brochures.

Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam’s 2018 Adi Kailash and Om Parvat programme ran 12 days from Dharchula, 15 days from Kathgodam and 17 days from Delhi, because most of it was walked. KMVN’s current packages are 4 nights / 5 days from Dharchula, 5 nights / 6 days from Tanakpur and 7 nights / 8 days from a Haldwani start. Two and a half weeks became five days, and nothing about the mountain changed. The road did.

Two pieces of construction did it:

• The 80 km Ghatiabagarh to Lipulekh Pass road, built by the Border Roads Organisation and inaugurated by the Defence Minister on 8 May 2020. It climbs from about 6,000 ft to 17,060 ft and replaced a 90 km high-altitude trek. The PIB release states it put 84 per cent of the Kailash Mansarovar journey on Indian roads.
• The 36 km Gunji to Jolingkong spur, blacktopped by the BRO in about 15 months at roughly 200 crore rupees, with a 3.75 m carriageway at around 14,000 ft. Reported complete in December 2024; by October 2025 the leg was described as taking under an hour where it had taken about two and a half.

A 5.4 km tunnel from Bundi to Garbyang, which would bypass the Chhiyalekh hairpins and shorten the route by 22 km, has money allocated for land acquisition — but as of 31 October 2025 its detailed project report was still in final approval and construction had not started. Do not plan around it. Several sites describe it as if it exists.

Permits, in summary

An Inner Line Permit is mandatory for everyone travelling beyond the Inner Line into the Vyas Valley — Gunji, Kalapani, Nabhidhang, Kuti and Jolingkong. The legal basis is the Ministry of Home Affairs’ own declaration that the part of Uttarakhand between the Inner Line and the international border is a Protected Area.

• Who issues it: the Sub-Divisional Magistrate, Dharchula. Since 2024 the District Magistrate’s office at Pithoragarh has issued them too, giving two counters. Not the ITBP, not the MHA, not Defence — for Indian citizens this is a civil district administration decision. The ITBP and SSB check permits; they do not issue them.
• What you need: photo ID (Aadhaar is named most often), a passport-size photograph, a medical fitness certificate from a government hospital doctor or a private MBBS doctor, police verification, and two mobile numbers.
• The fee: we could not verify one from any government source, any mainstream news report or any operator page we checked. So we do not publish a figure — and we equally do not claim the permit is free. Ask the SDM’s office.
• Foreign nationals cannot use the ILP route at all. They need a Protected Area Permit, granted centrally, and in practice very rarely issued for this valley.

The full detail, including the two competing online portal addresses and which one we can actually corroborate, is on the Inner Line Permit page.

Vehicles, in summary

Below Dharchula this is ordinary road and an ordinary car is fine. Above it, it is not.

• The District Magistrate of Pithoragarh publicly recommended four-wheel-drive vehicles for this route at the start of the 2026 season. That is a recommendation, not a legal mandate — we are not going to inflate it into one.
• The local working fleet on the hard section is Bolero, Bolero Camper, Thar and Sumo class. There is a reason for that.
• Union Minister of State Ajay Tamta, arguing for the Bundi–Garbyang tunnel, said plainly that heavy vehicles cannot manage the Chhiyalekh area. With a 3.75 m carriageway on the Jolingkong spur and 27 near-vertical hairpins on the Bundi–Chhiyalekh climb, a Tempo Traveller should be treated as ending its usefulness at Dharchula. We could not find a written notification banning them at a named point, so we will not tell you one exists.

See the 4x4 guide and the Tempo Traveller page. One widely repeated claim — that private vehicles are not permitted between Dharchula and Gunji — is contradicted by first-hand accounts of self-drive travellers reaching Gunji, Kuti and Jolingkong, so we do not publish it. What is documented is a timed traffic schedule between Dharchula and Tawaghat and a 4 PM cut-off for onward travel into Vyas Valley.

Season, in summary

The nominal season is 1 May to 30 November, with a monsoon interruption in July and August. In 2025 permits were issued from 28 April and the yatra ran to 30 November. In 2026 permits opened on 28 April and the yatra began on 1 May.

May–June and September–October are the usable windows. July–August is the monsoon, and on this road that is not a matter of a wet afternoon. The 1998 landslide at Malpa killed around 205 people including about 60 Kailash Mansarovar pilgrims, and the road has closed repeatedly since. From December to March the Vyas Valley villages including Gunji depopulate entirely — residents move down to Dharchula — so in deep winter there is often nobody up there to host you.

On 7 August 2026 the District Magistrate announced, on the Chief Minister’s direction, that the yatra would run year-round “except during adverse weather conditions and unforeseen emergencies”. That is an announced intention, not a current fact, and it was announced while permits were suspended and days before the road was closed by boulder falls. More on when to go and on the dated status page.

Why this became a mass journey

Four things converged, and all of them are checkable. The road, above. The Kailash Mansarovar Yatra to Tibet was suspended from 2020 and only resumed in June 2025, so for five years Adi Kailash was the only Kailash an Indian pilgrim could reach. Scale: the Ministry of External Affairs yatra takes 750 pilgrims a year by ballot, with a passport and a Chinese visa — Adi Kailash issued 36,776 Inner Line Permits in 39 days in 2026. And on 12 October 2023 the Prime Minister performed pooja at Parvati Kund, with darshan of Adi Kailash, a visit confirmed by the Prime Minister’s Office itself.

The numbers since are steep: about 17,408 visitors in 2023, roughly 36,500 permits in 2025, 52,441 pilgrims by 1 July 2026 and 76,930 by 7 August 2026. The district has projected more than 1.5 lakh by the end of the year — that is a projection, and we label it as one.

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Common questions