Wild camping on the Altmann: the ban is real, it is just not here

First, which Altmann

Ask swisstopo for an Altmann and it hands you two Hauptgipfel: this one in the Alpstein, canton St. Gallen, commune of Wildhaus-Alt St. Johann, and a far more obscure one above Fieschertal in Valais, roughly ninety kilometres southwest. This article is about the Alpstein Altmann at 2'434.9 metres, the second highest summit in the massif after the Säntis, because that is the one people mean. If you meant the Valais one, none of what follows applies to it.¹

The federal layer that does apply is BLN 1612 "Säntisgebiet", subarea 2, "Innerer Alpstein". It is worth being precise about what that does, because it gets quoted as though it were a prohibition. A federal inventory of landscapes binds authorities when they plan, permit and build. It is not a rule addressed to a person carrying a tent. Every other federal layer comes back empty at the point: no game reserve, no raised bog, fen or mire landscape, no floodplain, no dry meadow, no amphibian site, no waterbird reserve, no wildlife rest zone, no park.¹

One more thing about where you are standing: the cantonal border runs across this summit. St. Gallen holds the point by roughly two metres, closer than any handheld GPS can resolve, and Appenzell Innerrhoden begins on the other side. It matters less for the law than it sounds, because the pin is in St. Gallen and St. Gallen law is what applies to it. It matters a lot for what you will be told up there. Innerrhoden has a published position on the Alpstein and St. Gallen does not: pitching a tent needs the owner's consent, "das wilde Campieren ist nicht erlaubt", and a bivouac with a simple tent can be tolerated by arrangement with the Senn who runs the alp. The canton is the largest landowner in the massif, so that is an owner speaking, not a tourist board.¹⁰ What it is not is a statute. In June 2025 the same government decided it wants a general ban and handed the drafting to its Justice, Police and Military Department, stating in the same breath that the legal basis for it "ist momentan nicht vorhanden", it does not exist yet. So on the Innerrhoden side there is a clear answer from the landowner and still no fine behind it.¹¹

The camping ban exists, and it is written for two zones this parcel does not have

Wildhaus is not shy about it. Its protection ordinance uses the actual words, twice.

"die Nutzung zu Erholungs- und Freizeitzwecken, wie Lager, Zelten, Campieren und das Anfachen von Feuer, ausser an bezeichneten Stellen"Schutzverordnung Wildhaus, Reglement, art. 7 (Naturschutzgebiete) and art. 8 (Pufferzonen).

Art. 7 governs the nature reserves and puts that line in a list beside building, drainage, fertiliser, grazing, collecting plants and disturbing wildlife, and it adds a ban on leaving the marked paths. Art. 8 repeats the same camping clause for the buffer zones and the further ecologically valuable areas. Whoever drafted this knew exactly how to forbid a tent, and did it twice.³

And then neither zone is here. The cadastre extract for the parcel under the summit, EGRID CH858392773562, parcel 1470W, covers 3'200'179 square metres and carries 56 restrictions. Not one of them is a Naturschutzgebiet or a Pufferzone. That is worth more than a distance to the nearest one: across three and a bit square kilometres of this mountain, the zone that carries the camping ban simply does not appear.²

A word on how that negative was checked, because a clean-looking miss is the easiest mistake to make here. The 56 restrictions break down as 35 polygons, 2 points and 19 line strings, which accounts for all of them. The 19 lines are the communal footpath and road plan, and a line cannot contain a point, so nothing was quietly dropped on the way to the answer.²

What the point does carry is four things: the base designation for land outside any zone, a Geotopschutzgebiet, a Lebensraum-Kerngebiet, and noise sensitivity level III. The nearest neighbours are a hiking path 119 metres away, a further geotope at 132 metres, and a groundwater protection zone at 317.²

What the two zones over your head actually forbid

Both are in the same ordinance, a few articles further on, and both are worth reading rather than assuming.

Art. 11, geotope protection areas. Measures that impair the geotopes or their natural development are forbidden, and the article then names what it means: Geländeeingriffe, interventions in the terrain, and measures that change the water regime. Agriculture, forestry, hunting and fishing stay guaranteed. That is a rule about digging and drainage.⁴

Art. 14, habitat core areas. This one opens more broadly, and I want to be honest about it: the areas are "in ihrer Unberührtheit zu erhalten", to be preserved in their untouched state, and activities which remove or impair the protected feature are not permitted. Then comes the list of what that means in practice, and every item is infrastructure: erecting buildings and installations, intensifying farming, building or widening roads, putting up transport installations, quarrying, tipping and landfill.⁴

So there is no camping clause and no access clause in either. A tent for one night is not a terrain intervention and not an installation. But "Unberührtheit" is a strong word to have over your head, and it is the reason the ground rules below are about traces rather than paperwork.

The cantonal layer adds nothing. St. Gallen's nature protection ordinance returns zero occurrences of tent, camping, bivouac or overnight stay, against live controls elsewhere in the same text. And where the cantonal planning act does mention tents, it is zoning: camping and tent sites belong in an intensive recreation zone, alongside hotels, restaurants and sports halls.⁵

A broken cross-reference, for anyone who goes looking

This is a small thing, but it will waste your afternoon if you follow it, so here it is.

The ordinance's penalty article says breaches are dealt with "gemäss Art. 24 ff. NHG und Art. 132 BauG". The federal half is fine. The cantonal half points at the Baugesetz, which St. Gallen replaced with the Planungs- und Baugesetz of 5 July 2016. Open the current act at article 132 and you get Verfahrenskoordination, the coordination of permit procedures, which has nothing to do with penalties.⁶

The live provision is art. 162. A fine of up to 30'000 francs for anyone who intentionally or negligently, among other things, contravenes protection ordinances or public-law property restrictions issued in the interest of nature and heritage protection. That is the number that would actually apply, and it applies to the prohibitions that exist, which up here are about ground and buildings rather than tents.⁶

You cannot sleep on the Altmann, because you climb it

Here is where the legal reading stops being the point.

The Altmann is a climbing peak. The second highest in the Alpstein, and even the ordinary way up, from the Altmannsattel, asks for easy climbing and a head for heights rather than walking. The east ridge is eight pitches of grade III. People go up there roped, in the morning, and they come down again.⁸

The elevation model says 8.1 degrees at the summit point, and that number is an artefact. A 25 metre grid cannot see a sharp summit; it smooths it into one small flat cell. The tell is in the neighbours: within 100 metres of the pin the mean slope is 50.1 degrees, and 8.1 is the minimum in that radius. Across the whole 1.4 kilometre box the steepest reading is 70.8 degrees and only 74 of 3025 samples come in under 7, which is 2.4 per cent.⁷

So the verdict for the summit is straightforward, and it has nothing to do with Wildhaus. There is nowhere up there to lie down. That is the same reason the Hoher Kasten and the Niederhorn come out the way they do, in all three cases with a protection ordinance that turned out not to be the thing stopping you.

One point in the Altmann's favour, at least: it is genuinely remote. The nearest registered building stands 599 metres away, the next at 614 and 786, with 26 inside 1'500 metres. No cable car, no restaurant on the top.⁹

Where the night actually works, 304 metres away

This is the part worth having, and it is unusually clean for a summit article.

The pitch: 1.5 degrees at 2'145.4 metres, LV95 2'746'290 / 1'233'572. That is 304 metres from the summit point and 572 metres from the nearest registered building. It sits inside the same geotope area and habitat core area as the summit, and, as set out above, neither of those forbids camping. There is no nature reserve and no buffer zone anywhere on this parcel to fall foul of. Well above the treeline, so the Swiss Alpine Club's guidance on a single discreet night applies in full.²⁷

Why the rules below are about traces, not permits. You would be sleeping inside an area the ordinance wants kept "unberührt" and on top of protected geotopes, where the express prohibition is on interventions in the terrain. So: pitch on rock or gravel rather than turf, move nothing, dig nothing, no trenching, no fire, and leave the ground reading as though you were never there. That is not a legal formality here, it is the exact thing the two applicable articles are about.⁴

One candidate I am deliberately not giving you. The model finds comparable flat ground at 2'165.8 metres about 451 metres northeast, further still from any building. It falls outside parcel 1470W, so the extract I ran says nothing about which zones cover it, and I am not going to guess. If you want that one, pull its own cadastre extract first.²

And the timing. The ordinance's wildlife rest zones close to entry whenever there is snow lying, which is the sort of rule that catches people in a late spring or an early autumn. None of them covers this point, but they are in the same plan and worth a glance before a shoulder-season trip.³

General rules for wild camping

You are above the treeline, in a habitat core area and on protected geotopes, with no camping ban in sight. That combination puts the whole weight on how you behave rather than on what you are allowed.

• No fire. An open fire has no place in the mountains. A gas stove is enough.
• Pitch late, strike early. Set up towards evening, gone again early. A bivouac is one night, not a base camp.
• Leave no rubbish. Everything you carry up you carry down, organic scraps and toilet paper included.
• At least 50 metres from any water for the big business, so you do not foul what people and livestock drink.
• Stay small and quiet. A small group, no speaker, no drone, dogs on the lead, and the alp staff's word goes.

Disclaimer

This article reflects my research and assessment to the best of my knowledge, as of August 2026. It is based on the publicly accessible and official sources linked below. It does not replace legal advice and is not a binding statement of the current legal situation.

The legal half of this assessment is a negative: no instrument covering this parcel forbids camping, which is a scan result read against the same ordinance's express ban for two zone types that are not present. A commune or a court could read article 14's requirement to preserve the area in its untouched state more broadly than I have. The terrain half rests on the federal elevation model on a 25-metre grid, which as this article shows describes the shape of a mountain rather than the rock you would actually lie on. Before every tour, check the current sources yourself and follow the signs on site. A genuine emergency bivouac in distress is a separate question from a planned camp. Anyone who spends the night outside bears responsibility for their own conduct and any consequences themselves. Hikebeast, Leon Helg and Saftladen GmbH accept no liability for decisions made on the basis of this text, and call on no one to break applicable law.

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Leon Helg

Swiss filmmaker and software developer. Spends his free time in the Swiss Alps and maps his favourite spots for Hikebeast. Posts as @leon.helg on Instagram and TikTok.

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