Wild camping at the Griessseeli: the landowner says yes, in writing
Most of these articles are the story of finding the one door left open in a wall of prohibitions. This one is shorter, because there is no wall. Four layers of law were checked at this lake and every one of them is silent, and then the landowner goes further than silence and publishes a written yes.
What do these mean?
Illegal A specific rule bans it, usually with a fine, and it can be enforced. Sleep somewhere else.
Not allowed No real place to camp here. A gated site, a developed area, or nowhere sensible to lie down, even if no fine is attached.
It depends You can sleep here, but there's a condition first: ask the landowner, book a spot, stay inside a set zone, or use a bivvy instead of a tent. The report says which.
Tolerated No rule clearly allows or bans it, but a single night is accepted in practice and nobody enforces against it. Normal for high bivouacs above the treeline.
Legal Camping one night is fine here. Either a rule allows it, or we checked every law and found nothing against it. Still: pitch late, leave early, no trace.
Four layers, and all four are silent
Wild camping at the Griessseeli is lawful, and the useful part of this article is showing you how that conclusion was reached, because "we found no rule" is the easiest thing in this field to get wrong. A rule you failed to find looks exactly like a rule that does not exist.
Federal. Every inventory was queried at the point itself: landscape inventory, federal game reserves, wildlife rest zones, raised bogs, fens, mire landscapes, floodplains, dry grasslands, parks of national importance. All empty. Each run carried a deliberately invalid layer name as a control, which must come back as an error rather than as "nothing here", because a mistyped layer looks like a clean negative to any tool that only reads the results list.5
Cantonal. Uri's police act and its nature and heritage protection act were read in full, roughly 268'000 characters between them, and neither contains a single occurrence of Campieren, Zelt, Biwak, Übernachten or Lagern. Control words confirm the texts were actually searched. Uri simply has not legislated on this, and in November 2025 its government said publicly that a cantonal wild camping ban would be disproportionate.3
Communal. Spiringen's entire published legal collection is 24 documents and contains neither a police regulation nor a camping regulation. Its building and zoning ordinance, in force since 1 June 2024, returns zero occurrences of campieren and biwak.4
Landowner. This is where the answer stops being an absence and becomes a permission, and it is the next section.
Korporation Uri put it in writing
Most of Uri's alpine ground does not belong to the canton or the commune. It belongs to the Korporation Uri, a centuries-old commoners' corporation that is the largest landowner in the canton, and the Urnerboden and the alps above it are its ground. On a lake where no public rule applies, the landowner's position is the whole answer, and this landowner publishes it.1
"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."Korporation Uri, "Wildcampieren": there is no general prohibition on wild camping in canton Uri, so camping on Korporation ground is permitted in principle and does not have to be registered.
Read what that second sentence does. It is not a tolerance, and it is not a "we will decide when you ask". It is a standing permission, granted to everyone in advance, with no form to fill in for a normal night. That is why this article reads legal rather than "it depends": there is nothing left for you to obtain.
The conditions, which are short
- Protection zones: where they exist, their rules apply. At this lake none do, which the previous section established.
- Private roads: driving them needs the appropriate permit. You are walking from the Klausenpass, so this is about vehicles, not about you.
- Near a farm: if your spot is close to an alp business, speak to the Älpler or Älplerin. Good practice anywhere, and here it is written down.
- More than three nights, or more than ten people: tell the Korporation in advance. A single night with a friend is well inside the free case.
- Waste: in official fee-bearing bags, carried to a collection point.
- Leave it tidy: the site goes back in order when you strike camp.
Two places are expressly carved out of that permission, and it is worth knowing them because they are the reason people think Uri bans camping: the commune of Göschenen, where wild camping is prohibited outright, and the area around the Seewlisee in Silenen, where it is prohibited and only a prior permit makes an exception. The Griessseeli is neither. It is in Spiringen, and it is a different lake in a different valley.1
The reglement that looks like it applies
Here is the trap, and it is a good one, because a careful person searching for the rule will walk straight into it.
Uri protects the Maderanertal and Fellital region under a cantonal reglement, and that reglement contains not one but two camping prohibitions. Worse, if you search its text for the words that describe this lake you get hits: it talks about a Gletschervorfeld, a glacier forefield, and it names a place called Griessboden. Our lake is a glacier forefield lake with Griess in its name. It would be very easy, and completely wrong, to stop there.2
Three things put the lake outside it.
First, the perimeter. Article 2 draws the protected area along a list of summits, and two of them are Clariden and Chämmliberg. That ridge is the boundary, it runs about 1.6 km south of the lake, and the Maderanertal drains away on the far side of it. The Griessseeli is on the Klausenpass side, outside.
Second, the first camping ban is zoned. Article 7 prohibits pitching tents and camping, but only "in den Schutzzonen gemäss Artikel 6", and article 6 defines those zones as the biotopes at the Golzernsee: the shallows on its west shore, its landward bank, and the mires east of it. That is deep in the Maderanertal, a valley away.
Third, the second camping ban is zoned too, and this is where the coincidence lives. Article 9b prohibits tents and camping in the zones of article 9a, which are the "Naturschutzzone Auen und Gletschervorfeld Hüfifirn im Hinteren Maderanertal", the floodplains along the Chärstelenbach at Stössi, Stäuberboden and Griessboden.
So the glacier forefield in that article is the Hüfifirn's, not the Clariden's, and the Griess in it is a Griessboden in the Maderanertal, not our Griessseeli. Two words match and neither place does. If you take one methodological thing from this article: a keyword hit in a protection reglement is not a finding until you have read which zone it is bolted to.
The Urnerboden question, honestly
One thing genuinely is in motion nearby, and you should know about it rather than be surprised by it later.
Spiringen's assembly approved a partial revision of the communal land-use planning, by 45 votes to 7, which adapts the campsite zone on the Urnerboden and whose effect would be that wild camping is no longer permitted on the Urnerboden itself. Cantonal approval was reserved, and complaints, including one specifically about the camping zone, were still pending before the cantonal government.6
Two reasons this does not change the answer at the lake. The Urnerboden is the alp floor at about 1'370 m, 4.4 km north-east of this cirque and a genuinely different place: the flat, farmed, road-served alp where the pressure and the litter actually are. And the ordinance in force today, the one you can download from the commune, contains no wild camping prohibition of any kind.
What the current ordinance does contain, and what is easy to misread, is article 13, the zone for the designated Camping Mättenwang. Its second paragraph says that inside the Urnerboden mire landscape no new buildings or terrain changes are allowed, and that stationing caravans, mobile homes, tents and similar year-round is prohibited. That is a rule against parking a caravan permanently inside the campsite zone. It is not a ban on sleeping in a tent for one night 4 km up the mountain, and reading it as one is the same mistake as the Griessboden hit.4
So: correct today, worth re-checking if you are planning a trip to the Urnerboden itself rather than to the lake.
The ground, and why there are no coordinates in this section
Normally this is where a pitch gets named to the metre. Not here, and the reason is worth explaining because it also tells you something true about the place.
The map pin for this lake sits on the water, which is normal: gazetteer pins are label anchors placed at the middle of a feature. More awkwardly, the national elevation model renders a lake as a perfectly flat plane at water level, so a slope scan around this pin returns reading after reading of exactly 2'097.9 m at 0.0 degrees. Masking the mapped lake outline does not fully fix it either, because the outline is smaller than the flat plane in the model: this lake has been growing and moving. It did not exist before the 1980s, it appeared as the Claridenfirn pulled back, and it overflowed in June 2019.5
Publishing a decimal-place pitch off that data would be false precision, so here is the honest version instead. The cirque floor is broadly flat at lake level and much of it is wet, silty and seasonally under water. The ground to use is the older moraine terraces above the outlet, clearly higher than the water and clearly dry underfoot, well back from the shore and well away from the ice front. Judge it with your eyes when you are standing there, which for a lake that changes shape is better advice than a coordinate anyway.
Practical notes
- Getting there: the standard approach is from the Klausenpass, 1.8 km away, about an hour on a white-red-white mountain path. From the Urnerboden it is a longer day.
- Water: take it from the side streams, not from the lake, which is glacier-silty.
- The ice front: stay well back from it and from the outlet. This is an actively changing glacier lake, and the 2019 overflow is why it is monitored.
- Fire: a gas stove, and nothing else. There is nothing up here that should be burnt.
- Altitude: 2'098 m in a north-facing cirque under a big face. It is cold at night well into summer.
And the obvious one, which matters more here than in most places precisely because nobody is stopping you: this permission exists because visitors have not made it a problem. Leave the place as though the next person's answer depends on it, because it does.
General rules for wild camping
Camping is permitted here, so these are the landowner's conditions and ordinary mountain manners rather than prohibitions: bag your waste in official sacks and carry it out, gas stove only, speak to the Älpler if you pitch near an alp, and tell Korporation Uri in advance if you are staying more than three nights or coming with more than ten people.
- 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.
A permission is easier to withdraw than a prohibition is to enact: Korporation Uri could change its conditions, and the Spiringen land-use revision described above is not yet fully settled, so check the current position before relying on this, and follow instructions on site. The terrain description is deliberately qualitative because the elevation model flattens this lake and the lake itself is actively changing; it describes the ground and is not a safety assessment of your route, and an actively growing glacier lake deserves respect. 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
Can you wild camp at the Griessseeli?
Do I need to register or ask anyone?
Is the lake inside the Maderanertal protection area?
Is wild camping about to be banned on the Urnerboden?
Where exactly should I pitch?
Does canton Uri ban wild camping?
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.
Sources
- Korporation Uri, "Wildcampieren", the landowner's own published conditions. Korporation Uri is the largest landowner in canton Uri and the Urnerboden and the alps above it are its ground. Verbatim: "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." The published conditions are: in nature and landscape protection zones the applicable rules must be observed; on private roads the appropriate permit must be obtained; if the chosen spot is near an agricultural business, contact must be made with the Älpler or Älplerin; if the stay is longer than three nights or with more than ten people, the Korporation must be informed in advance; waste must be packed in official fee-bearing bags; and the site must be cleared and left in orderly condition. Two areas are expressly excluded: in the commune of Göschenen wild camping is prohibited, and in the area around the Seewlisee in Silenen wild camping is prohibited with an exception possible only on prior authorisation. Neither exclusion covers Spiringen or this lake. korporation.ch. ↩
- Reglement über den Schutz der Region Maderanertal und Fellital, canton Uri, RB 10.5111, read in full on 11 August 2026 through the cantonal legal collection API with HTML entities unescaped. Art. 2 places the area under protection "innerhalb der nachstehenden Grenzen" and lists the boundary points, which include "n) Clariden" and "o) Chämmliberg"; the Griessseeli lies on the northern, Klausenpass side of that ridge, about 1.6 km from the Clariden summit, and therefore outside. Art. 6 defines the protection zones as the biotopes at the Golzernsee: "a) Zone I: Flachwasserbereiche am Westufer des Golzernsees b) Zone II: landseitiges Ufer des Golzernsees c) Zone III: Moore östlich des Golzernsees". Art. 7 Abs. 1 opens "Verboten sind in den Schutzzonen gemäss Artikel 6", and Abs. 2 lit. f prohibits "zu zelten und zu campieren sowie Standplätze zu diesem Zweck zu überlassen". Art. 9a, headed "Naturschutzzone Auen und Gletschervorfeld Hüfifirn im Hinteren Maderanertal", places under protection "die Auengebiete entlang des Chärstelenbachs in Stössi, Stäuberboden und Griessboden" and defines zones I to IV including "Zone III: Naturschutzkernzone Gletschervorfeld"; Art. 9b Abs. 2 lit. j prohibits "zu zelten oder zu campieren" in those zones. Both camping prohibitions are therefore zone-bound, and the Griessboden and the Gletschervorfeld named in the reglement are in the Maderanertal, not at this lake. rechtsbuch.ur.ch. ↩
- Cantonal law of Uri, read in full on 11 August 2026 through the cantonal legal collection API, with HTML entities unescaped before searching because the API returns escaped text. The Polizeigesetz (RB 3.8111, 212'500 characters of body text) and the Gesetz über den Natur- und Heimatschutz (RB 10.5101, 55'041 characters) each return zero occurrences of Zelt, Campieren, Camping, Biwak, Übernachten, Nächtigen and Lagern. Positive controls confirm the texts were actually searched rather than silently empty: Polizei 142, Ordnung 39 and Busse 3 in RB 3.8111. The Reglement über den Schutz wildwachsender Pilze (RB 10.5131) and the Einführungsgesetz zum Schweizerischen Strafgesetzbuch (RB 3.9211) likewise return zero. Canton Uri therefore has no camping provision of its own, and in November 2025 the cantonal government stated publicly that a cantonal wild camping prohibition would be disproportionate. rechtsbuch.ur.ch. ↩
- Commune of Spiringen, published legal collection and Bau- und Zonenordnung, retrieved 11 August 2026. The commune's complete Rechtssammlung comprises 24 documents and contains neither a Polizeireglement nor a Campingreglement; the page itself returns zero occurrences of campier, zelt or camping. The Bau- und Zonenordnung in force since 1 June 2024 (57 pages) returns zero occurrences of campier, biwak and übernacht, with control terms Zone 163 and Baubewilligung 32 confirming the text was searched. Its only camping content is article 13, "Zone für Sport- und Freizeitanlagen Camping Mättenwang (SFCM)", which designates that zone as campsite area and whose paragraph 2 provides that within the Urnerboden mire landscape new buildings, installations and terrain changes are not permitted and that "Wohnwagen, Wohnmobilien, Zelte und ähnliche Einrichtungen während des ganzen Jahres zu stationieren, ist verboten". That is a prohibition on year-round stationing inside the designated campsite zone, not a prohibition on wild camping in the commune. spiringen.ch. ↩
- Official federal geodata and the cantonal cadastre, queried 11 August 2026 at LV95 2'709'322 / 1'190'503, commune Spiringen. Identify returns empty results at the point for the federal landscape inventory, federal game reserves, wildlife rest zones, raised bogs, fens, mire landscapes, floodplains, dry grasslands and pastures, parks of national importance and Emerald sites. Every query ran alongside a deliberately invalid layer id as a control: that control returns HTTP 400 while all real layers return HTTP 200, and a positive control point inside federal game reserve no. 3 Kiental correctly returns that polygon. The cadastre of public-law restrictions for canton Uri (EGRID CH190779194677, parcel 3, land registry area 28'557'606 m², 454 restrictions) was taken with geometry and tested point-in-polygon: only the communal basic land-use zoning and a Gewässerschutzbereich cover the point, while the theme for nature and landscape protection measures of national and regional importance has its nearest boundary vertex 649 m away. A parser note for anyone repeating this: Uri encodes ÖREB coordinates as strings inside geo:c1 and geo:c2 objects rather than as numeric arrays, so a conventional parser silently matches nothing and reports a false "no restrictions"; after correction 312 of 454 restrictions yielded a testable ring. Terrain: the map pin lies inside the lake outline, and slope sampling returns repeated readings of exactly 2'097.9 metres at 0.0 degrees, the elevation model's flat water plane, which is why this article publishes no computed pitch coordinates. map.geo.admin.ch, oereb.ur.ch. ↩
- Spiringen land-use planning revision, reported 2026. The communal assembly of Spiringen approved a partial revision of the local land-use planning by 45 votes to 7, adapting the existing camping zone on the Urnerboden and integrating a building for the necessary infrastructure, with the effect that wild camping would no longer be permitted on the Urnerboden itself. Approval by the cantonal government was expressly reserved, and three complaints, including one concerning the camping zone, remained pending before the cantonal government to be dealt with separately. Alpine farmers on the Urnerboden had objected to the planned camping zone. The Urnerboden lies about 4.4 km north-east of the Griessseeli at roughly 1'370 m, and the Bau- und Zonenordnung in force at the time of writing contains no wild camping prohibition. Separately, in November 2025 the Uri cantonal government rejected a cantonal wild camping ban as disproportionate. urnerzeitung.ch. ↩