Wild camping at the Chammseeli: there are three of them, and the answers are opposite

First, work out which lake you mean

Wild camping at the Chammseeli cannot be answered until you know which Chammseeli. The national gazetteer returns four entries for three locations, and if you check the map yourself and count four, that is why.

• A, Glarus Süd (GL), 2'012 m. In the Kärpf, 456 metres from the Leglerhütte SAC. This is the one most people mean when they type the name: it comes first in the gazetteer, first in the map geocoders, it has the most trip reports, and the biggest Swiss lake portal redirects the bare name to it.
• B, Mels (SG), 2'312 m. A small cirque lake at the head of the Obersiez in the Weisstannental, also called Siezseeli. The highest and the most alpine of the three, and the only one on a numbered route.
• C, Quarten (SG), 2'155 m. Not one lake but a pair, twelve metres apart at the shoreline and joined by a land bridge, on the plateau behind the Murgseen. Both are officially called Chammseeli, which is where the fourth gazetteer entry comes from.¹

They sit inside one sixteen-kilometre triangle in the Glarus and Sarganserland corner: A to B is 16.2 km, A to C 13.9 km, B to C 6.4 km. The confusion is not ours. The largest Swiss lake portal prints a warning on its Quarten page telling readers not to confuse it with the one on Mels territory, and Swiss sources routinely disambiguate by adding the municipality or the spot height.¹

One oddity that tells you how little-visited all three are: across every hiking platform we checked, the total number of reviews for all three lakes combined is one. No Wikipedia article exists for any of them and there is no Wikidata entry under the name.⁹

If you genuinely cannot tell which one you meant, assume Glarus and act accordingly. That is the safe default, and not only because it is the likeliest match. Guessing Glarus and being wrong sends you to a lake where nothing prohibits camping, which costs you nothing. Guessing one of the St. Gallen lakes and being wrong walks you into the integral zone of a federal game reserve.

The three answers

A, Glarus Süd: prohibited, and the chain is closed at every link. The lake is inside federal game reserve no. 12, the Freiberg Kärpf, and specifically inside its integral-protection part of 5'897.6 hectares rather than the 3'527.4-hectare partial part. The federal ordinance is short and blunt.

"Das freie Zelten und Campieren ist verboten. Vorbehalten bleibt die Benutzung offizieller Zeltplätze. Die Kantone können Ausnahmen bewilligen."Verordnung über die eidgenössischen Jagdbanngebiete (VEJ, SR 922.31), art. 5 para. 1 lit. e: free tenting and camping is prohibited; the use of official campsites is reserved; the cantons may authorise exceptions.

Note the last sentence: the exception is the canton's to give, not the landowner's, and Glarus has enacted none. Note also the first two words. The prohibition attaches to free camping, which is what carries the outside-an-official-campsite limitation, and there is no official campsite anywhere inside the Kärpf perimeter.²

What it actually costs, stated properly. The ordinance itself carries no penalty article. The number to plan around is CHF 150, a fixed penalty the Confederation wrote out expressly for this offence, citing the game-reserve ordinance and the Hunting Act together. The CHF 20'000 people quote is the ceiling under the Hunting Act if the matter leaves the fixed-penalty procedure for ordinary proceedings, which happens if you decline the summary process or do not pay. And unlike several places we have researched, there is somebody up there entitled to issue it: canton Glarus has expressly deputised its game wardens for exactly this range of federal tariffs.²

And here is what makes this lake different from almost every spot in this series. At the Tannhorn you can step three metres. At Rigi Kulm five. Here the nearest reserve boundary of any kind is 1'746 metres away and 1'313 metres above sea level, which is to say seven hundred metres below the lake. You cannot walk out of the Kärpf at altitude from this basin. Leaving means descending into the valley. There is no clever margin here and this article is not going to invent one.¹

One detail says a lot about how settled this is. The commune of Glarus Süd owns the 457-hectare parcel the lake sits on. It has gone to the cantonal court twice to obtain judicial camping prohibitions elsewhere on its own ground, at the Muttenchopf and above 2'200 metres at Elm, and it has never sought one here. It does not need to: the federal ban already covers the lake, and canton Glarus itself has no camping rule of general application, which we established by pulling all 487 cantonal acts rather than by searching for one.⁴

B, Mels: nothing prohibits it, in any season, and that is the result of looking rather than of not looking. Every federal layer is empty at the point. Canton St. Gallen has no camping prohibition of general application: all 731 acts in the cantonal collection were pulled and searched, and the only one that bans camping anywhere is an ordinance about a single square in the city of St. Gallen. The commune of Mels publishes 47 enactments, its police reglement contains no camping provision at all, and while its protection ordinance does ban camping, that ban is tied to 27 named nature reserves plus one lake, the nearest of which is about three kilometres away.⁶⁸

The commune boundary runs 173 metres north of the pin, so a tent pitched a little way north is in Flums rather than Mels. That was worth closing and it changes nothing: Flums publishes 98 enactments, its protection ordinance carries the same object-bound camping ban, and the nearest object it applies to is 8.7 kilometres away. Flums did acquire a general camping ban on 1 January 2026, but it reaches only the commune's own public ground, not alp pasture.⁷

C, Quarten: shut for the winter, open for the summer, and the winter rule is stronger than a camping ban. The lakes sit inside the Murgtal wildlife rest zone, and the commune's protection ordinance does not merely forbid camping there.

"In den Wildruhezonen sind alle Wintersportaktivitäten sowie das Betreten und Befahren während der Zeit vom 15. Dezember bis Ende Skisaison untersagt."Schutzverordnung der Politischen Gemeinde Quarten, Teil Landschafts- und Naturschutz, art. 18 para. 1: in the wildlife rest zones all winter-sports activity and all entry and driving are prohibited from 15 December to the end of the ski season.

Camping is never mentioned, because it does not need to be. What is prohibited is being there, which catches a tent and a tentless bivouac equally and leaves no wording gap to argue about. The fine is set by a different act, the cantonal hunting act, at up to CHF 20'000, with CHF 100 as the fixed penalty in light cases. Outside that window the ordinance imposes nothing at all: there is no summer measure.⁵

One thing at the Quarten lakes to be honest about. A nature reserve boundary runs about 72 metres west of the pin, and inside it the same ordinance bans camping year-round in terms that would catch a bivvy bag. Two complications: the cantonal approval in 2021 expressly withheld approval of that part, leaving a 1997 version in force for it, and the 1997 text is not published anywhere. We tried the commune, the cadastre and the cantonal collection. So the honest statement is that we could not read the operative wording, and that on open water 72 metres is not a comfortable margin.⁵

All three map pins are in the water, and where the ground actually is

Do not navigate to any of the published coordinates. All three sit on open water. That is not three sloppy pins, it is systematic: these are gazetteer label anchors, placed at the centre of the feature they name by construction. We checked each one point-in-polygon against the federal hydrography dataset.¹

• A, Glarus Süd: 11.6 m from shore, nearest land to the south-south-east, on a lake 232 by 110 m. The flat ground is the north-east to east-north-east shore, which falls at under one degree over the first forty metres. Not boggy. Running water 71 m away, the marked trail 93 m south.
• B, Mels: 25.4 m from shore, nearest land to the north, on a lake 99 by 71 m. The usable bench is the east to south-east shore and it is narrow, about forty metres wide before the ground drops away at ten to eighteen degrees. Running water 59 m away, the marked trail 167 m north-west.
• C, Quarten: 35.4 m from shore on the eastern lake. The flat ground is the corridor between and around the two lakes, north, north-west and north-east, and it is the most generous of the three. Outflow 10 m south, the marked path 114 m north-north-east.

Would anyone actually sleep at these, if the law let them? All three pass, which is not always the case in this series. All three are above the local tree line, though by very different margins: roughly 200 to 260 metres at Glarus, 360 to 520 at Quarten, and 730 to 800 at Mels, which makes the Mels lake the least arguable "above the tree line" of the three by a wide distance. All three have running water within eighty metres and a marked trail within 170 metres.¹

The one lake anybody has actually slept at is the one in Quarten. A photographer's account from August 2017 describes arriving at the two lakes, finding a tent spot straight away and being rained on, and a GPS track from August 2024 shows an eleven-hour stationary gap on the plateau a kilometre north-east. For the Glarus and Mels lakes we found no overnight account at all. The single report that names the Mels lake in its title is somebody stopping to swim in it, sixteen degrees, and noting that the lake has no inflow.⁹

Worth saying that both documented Quarten overnights are in August, which is to say outside the protection window. Nobody on record has camped there in the closed season. There is one unanswered question hanging over that 2017 account: a commenter asked the photographer three years later whether he had had any trouble camping in the wildlife rest zone, adding that he himself would not officially be allowed to, and the photographer answered other comments but never that one.⁹

What the official Kärpf material does and does not say is worth one line, because it cuts against expectation. We read the federal inventory sheet for the reserve in full: it describes the area and its objectives and sets out the integral and partial split, and it contains no mention of tents, camping, bivouacking, dogs, leashes or drones. The visitor leaflet the region publishes is the same. It calls out dogs, drones and staying on trails, and never mentions camping, even though the federal camping ban is the strictest rule in the whole reserve.³

And a live one at the Quarten lakes. The Murgseehütte publishes a notice headed "Wildcampen verboten", stating that by decision of the commune of Murg camping is prohibited throughout the Murgtal including the area around the hut. Treat that as what it is. The ground at the Chammseeli belongs to the Ortsgemeinde Quarten, not to Murg, so a landowner decision by Murg has no property basis at this particular lake, and we could not find the text of that decision published anywhere. The winter entry ban above is the rule that actually bites here.¹⁰

Where you can legally sleep

• At the Glarus lake: the Leglerhütte SAC, 456 metres away and 260 metres above, 54 places plus a six-place winter room. Note that the 2026 season, running to 18 October, is the wardens' tenth and last. Below it, the Berghotel Mettmen and the Naturfründehuus at Mettmenalp.
• At the Mels lake: the Spitzmeilenhütte SAC, 3.4 kilometres north-north-west, about 50 places including a six to eight place winter room open all year. Lower down, Alp Siez at Vorsiez has a 35-place mattress dormitory, and Weisstannen has two hotels.
• At the Quarten lakes: the Murgseehütte, 34 dormitory places plus small rooms, half board around CHF 55 to 60. Note it is a Berggasthaus rather than an SAC hut. Also the Skihütte Mülibachtal and the Berghotel Seebenalp.
• Campsites are a long way from all three: the Walensee for the St. Gallen lakes, and for Glarus the Klöntal or Walensee sites, forty to sixty kilometres by road. There is no official campsite in the Sernftal or near Mettmen.
• Not the Glarus lake, in any season, and not the Quarten lakes between 15 December and the end of the ski season.

General rules for wild camping

This applies wherever you are genuinely allowed to sleep outside, which of these three means the Mels lake all year and the Quarten pair in summer. It is not legal text, it is decency and common sense, and in a basin with a resident wolf pack and grazing cattle it matters more than usual.

• 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 July 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.

Three lakes share this name and their rules change independently of one another. The Quarten protection ordinance is currently being amended, and the nature reserve next to those lakes is governed by a 1997 text that is not published. Before every tour, check which lake you are actually going to, check the current sources yourself, and follow instructions 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.

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.

About Hikebeast Wildcamping Legality Checker Wild camping Lac d'Emosson Swiss Gems Guide