Surkanda Devi
— — a small temple the clouds keep finding.
Not only on a wall.
“A hilltop shrine in Uttarakhand, reached on foot from the road at Kaddukhal. The climb is short but steep, switchbacking through deodar and oak until the trees thin and the temple appears with the snow line of the Greater Himalayas behind it. Pilgrims come up at sunrise carrying bells, and the wind takes the bells before they reach the next ridge. From the studio, this is the kind of place that earns its silence by being a little hard to get to. from the studio
Surkanda Devi, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Surkanda Devi sits at roughly 2,757 metres on a forested peak in the Tehri Garhwal district of Uttarakhand, on the ridge between Chamba and Dhanaulti. The temple is one of the fifty-one Shakti Peethas in Hindu tradition — pilgrimage points where parts of the goddess Sati are said to have fallen, in this case her head. The shrine is reached by a steep walking trail of about one and a half kilometres from the roadhead at Kaddukhal, through stands of deodar, oak, and rhododendron, with the snowline of the Greater Himalayas visible to the north on clear days.
The peak clears the surrounding ridges enough to catch weather from two directions. Mist from the Doon valley rises against it in the late morning, and afternoons in monsoon season often close the summit in cloud within minutes. On a settled day the view stretches from the Gangotri group in the north-east to the Bandarpoonch massif west of it, both well above six thousand metres. The climb itself gains around three hundred metres from Kaddukhal, enough that most visitors arrive a little out of breath and stand quietly for a while before entering the courtyard.
The temple's largest gathering is the Ganga Dussehra fair, held annually in May or June on the tenth day of the waxing moon in the Hindu month of Jyeshtha. Thousands of pilgrims climb the trail across the festival day and the surrounding nights, many carrying offerings of red cloth and bells that they tie to the iron railings around the sanctum. Outside the festival, the site is quiet — a few dozen visitors on a weekday, mostly local families and walkers up from Mussoorie, about twenty-four kilometres west by road.