6,500 pilgrims walked out through a broken Kedarnath track after Chirbasa rockfall

More than 6,500 pilgrims were escorted on Monday through a damaged stretch of the Kedarnath trek near the Chirbasa helipad, about 2.5 kilometres above Gaurikund in Rudraprayag district. The State Disaster Response Force said a landslide on Sunday morning had torn up part of the Gaurikund-Kedarnath path and made it unsafe for unguided crossing. About 600 to 700 horses and mules were taken through the same gap.

Madan Mohan Tiwari, 65, a mule operator from Pathali village in Ukhimath, died after falling rock hit him near Chirbasa on Sunday. Police said stones kept coming off the hillside through the day, which is why machines could not clear the track while people were still stuck on both sides.

How the bottleneck was run

Pilgrims walking up were stopped at Sonprayag. Those coming down after darshan were held at Jungle Chatti and then walked across in groups once the weather eased on Monday morning. The District Emergency Operation Centre in Rudraprayag coordinated the pauses. An SDRF team from the Sonprayag post, led by sub-inspector Ashish Dimri on the orders of commandant Arpan Yaduvanshi, worked with police, the District Disaster Response Force and the local administration.

Yaduvanshi said movement on the route stayed partly restricted even after the escort. The Public Works Department began shifting debris once the rockfall paused. Continuous rain in Rudraprayag town and other hill blocks had already raised the Alaknanda and Mandakini last week. That water, and the loosened slope above Chirbasa, are the same monsoon pattern that has closed this path in other years.

A shrine route that fails in the same place

The walk from Gaurikund to Kedarnath is the last hard stretch of a yatra that now also uses helicopters. Chirbasa sits on that walk, beside a helipad that is supposed to be an escape valve. When the hillside above the helipad lets go, both the footpath and the air option are affected. Sunday's slide did not empty the temple. It trapped people in motion, which is the more common form of Himalayan disaster in pilgrimage season: not a buried town, but a broken corridor.

Uttarakhand has spent a decade widening roads, adding helipads and posting SDRF units on this route after the 2013 flood. The Monday operation shows the apparatus works when the rain stops. It also shows the limit. A single boulder killed a man whose job was to carry other people's bags. Several thousand other people waited for a break in the weather. That is not a failure of the escort. It is the condition of a track cut into a young, wet slope.

Authorities had already halted new upward movement on Sunday as a precaution. The choice on Monday was to move the people who were already on the mountain rather than leave them overnight above a live slide. Phased crossing is slower than a cleared road. It is faster than a second casualty list.

What happens next on the path

PWD clearance will decide whether Tuesday's pilgrims walk or wait at Sonprayag again. The district will keep publishing weather and river readings because the Mandakini does not need a new slide to close the lower road. For the families of the 6,500 who crossed, the story ended in Gaurikund. For Tiwari's family in Pathali, it ended on the same stone that blocked the others.