Wild camping on the Bälmeten: lawful, but not on the cairn

The law, briefly, because Uri makes it brief

Federal first. Queried at the summit on 14 August 2026, at 2'694'743 / 1'187'400 in LV95 and 46.830998 N / 8.680465 E, at 2'415.4 metres: no game reserve, no wildlife rest zone, no BLN landscape, no floodplain, no raised bog, no fen, no mire landscape, no dry meadow, no amphibian site, no waterbird reserve, no forest reserve, no national park. All empty, with an invalid-layer control that returns HTTP 400 rather than an empty list, and a positive control on a known game reserve that returns it.¹

One near miss worth naming so nobody thinks it was missed: a dry meadow of national importance, Honegg, lies within a kilometre of the summit. It is not at the pin and it is not on the shoulder described below, but it is a reminder that the slopes here are not uniformly unremarkable, and that dropping a long way off the ridge to find grass can put you somewhere that does have rules.¹

The canton is the short part. Uri's Polizeigesetz (RB 3.8111), Polizeireglement (RB 3.8127) and Gesetz über den Natur- und Heimatschutz (RB 10.5101) were pulled in full and scanned on word boundaries for campieren, zelten, lagern, biwakieren, Camping and übernachten. Zero hits across all three, in roughly 428'000 characters, while control words in the same texts count normally. There is no general Uri camping ban to break.²

The fine that exists is narrow. Uri's Ordnungsbussenreglement (RB 3.9223) prices "Lagern, Zelten oder Campieren in Schutzzonen" at 150 francs, but only through art. 34 para. 1 lit. a of the nature-protection act "in Verbindung mit dem jeweiligen Reglement", and that article punishes only contravening a Schutzmassnahme, a protection measure. So the fine needs a measure in force where you are standing.³

There is no measure here. The canton's protection-measure layers, in their legally effective rkr versions, return nothing at the summit for both the national and regional set and the local set. The cantonal protection inventory returns nothing either, and it would not matter much if it did: the canton's own metadata records it as having "lediglich hinweisenden Charakter" and being binding on authorities only. An invalid layer name in the same service returns a ServiceExceptionReport, so these zeroes are answers.⁴

The map says forest. The map is wrong, and it says so itself

Query the communal land-use layer at the summit and it answers Wald, forest. At 2'415 metres, on bare rock, that is obviously not a description of where you are standing, and it is the kind of thing that gets repeated as "you cannot camp, it is forest".

Two things settle it. First, the layer flags itself: the record's own bindingness field reads hinweisend, indicative, not a binding land-use designation. That is the canton telling you not to lean on it. Second, the parcel's land-cover record explains where the label comes from. This is parcel 745 in Erstfeld, and it is enormous: 4'511'929 square metres, about 451 hectares, running from the valley forest to the summit. Its recorded cover is 322.4 hectares of closed forest, 70.7 hectares unvegetated, and small slivers of meadow and track. The forest is real, it is just 1'200 metres below you.⁶

The summit is in the unvegetated part, well above the tree line. Nothing about a forest designation reaches it, and no cantonal forest rule was found that would prohibit a night out anywhere in Uri in any case.⁶²

You cannot sleep on the summit point, and that is the real constraint

This is where the honest answer differs from the legal one. The summit measures 31.5 degrees. That is not a tent site under any interpretation, and if this article stopped at "nothing prohibits it" it would be technically right and practically useless.¹

The steepness is real rather than an artefact of the terrain model, and that is worth checking because models smooth sharp summits and can invent flatness that is not there. The test is which way the neighbourhood runs: the pin is the local high point, and ground within 100 metres drops to 2'288.7 m, a full 127 metres below. A model that were smoothing this summit would have flattened it, not steepened it.¹

The usable ground is 70 metres east, at 2'409.3 metres. Six metres below the cairn, on the same shoulder, a two minute walk. It measures 3.2 degrees in a 6.25 m window, 4.6 degrees at 12.5 m and 4.4 degrees at 25 m, and the stability across all three window sizes is the point: a single flat reading can be noise, three consistent ones are terrain.¹

The neighbourhood confirms it from a different direction. Sampling eight bearings at 25 metres around that spot returns heights of 2'407.0, 2'407.8, 2'408.7, 2'408.7, 2'409.2, 2'410.3, 2'410.7 and 2'411.9 metres. That is a spread of under five metres across a fifty metre circle. It is a genuine small platform, not a pixel.¹

If you want more room and do not need the summit, a masked scan found 3.8 degrees at 2'331.9 m, 443 metres east and 83 metres lower, and 4.0 degrees at 2'294.4 m, 645 metres out. Both are lower and both cost you the sunrise you came for, so they are fallbacks rather than recommendations.¹

The landowner's yes, and how far it carries

Korporation Uri describes itself as "die grösste Grundeigentümerin in Uri", the largest landowner in the canton, and publishes on its own service page:⁵⁷

"Im Kanton Uri besteht kein generelles Verbot für Wildcamping. Auf Gebiet der Korporation Uri ist das Campieren somit grundsätzlich erlaubt und muss nicht angemeldet werden." Camping on Korporation ground is allowed in principle and needs no registration.⁵

The conditions are short: respect the rules inside nature and landscape protection zones, spare the pasture, get the right permit for private roads, contact the herder if your spot is near a farming operation, tell the Korporation in advance above three nights or ten people, carry your rubbish out in charged bags, leave the place tidy.⁵

How far that carries here, stated honestly. The land register does not publish ownership parcel by parcel, so this article does not claim that parcel 745 in Erstfeld is Korporation ground. What can be said is that the corporation's permission covers a large share of Uri's alp land, and that if this particular slope is not theirs, nothing above changes about the absence of a prohibition. It would simply mean the ground belongs to someone else worth asking. Unlike the Fisetenpass, there is nobody obvious to ask on the spot: OpenStreetMap records no building at all within 900 metres of the summit, so there is no alp hut up here to knock on.¹⁷

Getting there, and what would change the answer

The usual approach is from the Haldi cable car above Schattdorf, over Haseli and the Bälmeter Grätli, and it is a demanding mountain walk rather than a stroll. Since 2013 the north face also carries the Bälmetentor via ferrata, a short but serious route that threads through a hole in the rock. Neither of those is a legal question, but both decide whether you arrive at the shoulder with enough daylight to pitch, which in practice matters more than the statute does.⁸

What would change the legal answer: a protection measure newly entered in the cantonal layers, a revision of Erstfeld's land-use plan that puts a binding designation on this ground, or Korporation Uri narrowing its published permission. All three are published by the canton or the owner, and all three are checkable at the links below before you walk up.

General rules for wild camping

You are above the tree line on a summit with no infrastructure and no water, on a small platform that a handful of people can fill. That asks for a higher standard than a roadside pitch:

• 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

Everything here is a journalistic assessment as of August 2026, from the sources linked below, and it is not legal advice.

The terrain figures come from the national height model, not from a visit. A model is good at slope and bad at loose rock, so treat 2'409 m as where to look rather than as a surveyed tent platform, and use your own eyes when you get there.

Uri's official register of landownership restrictions did not answer for this parcel. The zoning and protection findings come from the canton's own in-force layers instead, queried point by point with a control.

Frequently asked questions

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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