"Above the treeline it's allowed": where that sentence comes from, and what it actually costs

Altitude does not decide whether you are allowed to sleep somewhere. The named rule does. The Alpine Club wrote that sites above the treeline are usually unproblematic ecologically.¹ It is a sentence about where you do the least damage, not about where you are permitted to be. The same page says in plain words that the legal situation in Switzerland is not uniform and that numerous communes have additional rules on top.²

What the Alpine Club actually wrote

The source everyone is quoting, usually without naming it, is the SAC information sheet on camping and bivouacking. Read it in the original and the structure is obvious. There is a section on the legal position, and a separate section on choosing a site responsibly. The treeline sentence lives in the second one. Above the treeline you are off the habitat of the black grouse and away from the browsing ground of hoofed game, so a single considerate night up there does less harm than the same night lower down.¹ That is an ecological judgment, and a good one.

What the sheet does not say, anywhere, is that being above the treeline makes camping lawful. It says the opposite in the legal section: access to forest and pasture is open under Art. 699 para. 1 of the Civil Code, and depending on the canton or commune, restrictions may apply on top.² The SAC is a mountaineering association. It writes recommendations. It does not issue permissions, and it has never claimed to.

The sheet also names the places where the answer is a flat no regardless of how considerate you are: the Swiss National Park, the federal hunting-ban districts, many nature reserves, and wildlife rest zones during their protection period.¹ Several of those sit entirely above the treeline. If altitude granted permission, that list could not exist.

How a sentence about grouse became a permission slip

The mutation is easy to follow because each step looks reasonable. The SAC says sites above the treeline are usually unproblematic. A guide drops the word "ecologically", because in context it felt redundant. The next guide reads that version and writes "above the treeline it is permitted", because unproblematic and permitted are near enough in everyday German. A third reads that and adds a number: one night, small group, above the treeline, allowed.

By the time it reaches a search result the qualifier is gone entirely, and the claim reads as if it came from a statute. It did not. There is no Swiss article that makes altitude the test. There is no bivouac act at all. The question of whether you may sleep on a given piece of ground still hangs on Art. 699 of the Civil Code from 1907, written for people picking berries, plus whatever the canton and the commune have layered on since.

The reason the misquote survives is that it is right often enough to feel true. Plenty of high ground genuinely has no rule against sleeping on it, and people who camp there are not fined, because there is nothing to fine them under. The claim only fails when a commune has written something, and you cannot tell which communes those are by looking at the altimeter.

What happened when we checked 48 spots

We have now researched the legal position at 48 Swiss spots one at a time, reading the actual communal and cantonal rulebooks rather than repeating what other sites say. Most of those spots are above the treeline. If the claim held, nearly all of them would have come back legal.

They did not. Across all 48, exactly 9 came out legal. 15 came out forbidden, 16 restricted, 5 discouraged and 3 tolerated. Narrow it to the spots sitting at or above 2,000 metres, which is unambiguously above the treeline everywhere on the northern side of the Alps and above it in Ticino too, and the picture barely improves: of 17 such spots, 6 are legal and 11 are not.

The forbidden ones are not marginal cases either. The Stellisee sits at 2,537 metres, higher than most people will ever pitch a tent in Switzerland, and Zermatt's police regulation prices a tent there at about CHF 200.³ The Tannhorn at 2,221 metres is inside a federal hunting-ban district, where the ceiling under the federal Hunting Act is CHF 20,000 and no communal or cantonal permission reaches inside.⁴ Neither of those rules mentions altitude, because altitude is not what they are about.

The three things that outrank your altimeter

The commune. This is the layer that catches most people, because it is invisible from the trail and there is no central register of it. A commune can ban camping across its whole territory, including on private ground, and many have. Vals did it in 1974 in a single article of police law, and that one page decides a lake at 2,409 metres.⁵ Ceilings in communal reglements run from a few hundred francs to CHF 5,000, and they apply at any height inside the boundary.

Federal protected areas. Inside a federal hunting-ban district, free camping is prohibited by federal ordinance, and the cantons can grant exceptions but a commune cannot.⁴ The fixed penalty for camping inside one is CHF 150.⁶ These districts are drawn around high alpine terrain almost by definition, so "above the treeline" and "inside a federal reserve" describe the same ground surprisingly often.

Cantonal nature protection. The heaviest numbers in our whole corpus come from here, not from camping law. At the Engstlensee the relevant ceiling is CHF 50,000 under the Bern Nature Protection Act.⁷ Nobody is handing out CHF 50,000 fines to hikers, but the point stands: the instrument that catches you decides the number, and none of these instruments care how high you are.

What to do instead of reading the altimeter

The habit that actually works is boring. Find out which commune you will be standing in, and check whether that commune has written a camping rule. Then check whether the spot falls inside a federal hunting-ban district or a wildlife rest zone, because those override everything below them. That is two questions, and they are answerable before you leave the house.

Being above the treeline still matters, just not for the reason people think. It matters because it is where you do the least ecological damage, which is exactly what the SAC said in the first place. Get the legal question answered separately, then use the altitude advice for what it was written for: choosing the least harmful spot among the ones you are actually allowed to use.

Six spots above 2,000 metres, and what the rule actually says

All six are above the treeline. Three are fine, three are not, and you cannot tell which is which from the map contour lines.

• Stellisee, 2,537 mForbidden

  Zermatt's police regulation of 2022 bans camping across the commune. About CHF 200 per tent, plus costs. Nothing about the altitude helps here.³

• Guraletschsee, 2,409 mIt depends

  Vals bans camping across the whole commune, private ground included, then exempts a bivouac on a mountain tour by name in the same article. A tent needs a permit, a bivvy bag does not.⁵

• Chaiserstuel, 2,400 mLegal

  Uri has no camping ban, and the landowner here pre-permits a night. This is what the claim looks like when it happens to be right.

• Tannhorn, 2,221 mForbidden

  Inside a federal hunting-ban district. The prohibition is federal, so no communal permission reaches it, and the Hunting Act ceiling is CHF 20,000.⁴

• Milchspüelersee, 2,196 mForbidden

  Inside the federal Kärpf reserve, the oldest of its kind in Europe. Free camping there is a CHF 150 fixed penalty.⁶

• Fessisee, 2,170 mLegal

  Glarus has no cantonal camping norm and nothing communal reaches the lake. Legal for the same reason Chaiserstuel is: an absence, not an altitude.