Wild camping on the Hoher Kasten: no rule stops you, the restaurant does

The camping ban exists, and it is in the wrong article for this summit

Wild camping on the Hoher Kasten looks like it should be settled by a protection ordinance, and the interesting part is that it is not.

First, the canton, because this one is genuinely confusing. The Hauptgipfel is in St. Gallen, commune of Altstätten. The Appenzell Innerrhoden side, Schwende-Rüte, holds the cable-car station about 74 metres away. The border runs straight across the top, so this is a two-canton mountain, but the summit point itself is St. Gallen and it is the St. Gallen cadastre and the Altstätten ordinance that govern it.¹

What the cadastre returns at the pin. Four restrictions, all with surface geometry: a Landschaftsschutzgebiet, a Spezielle Schutzverordnung, the agricultural base zone and noise sensitivity level III. Worth noticing in passing: the parcel under the summit is 275 square metres. That is a building plot, not a mountainside, which tells you what is up there before you read a single article.²

The zone that covers you. Art. 8 of the Altstätten protection ordinance defines the Landschaftsschutzgebiete as particularly beautiful or historically valuable landscapes, and then, in its only operative paragraph, says this: permissible buildings and installations must fit well into the landscape in terms of position, size, form and structure, materials and colours. That is a design provision aimed at architects. There is no list of forbidden activities in it at all.³

"n) das unbefugte Betreten ausserhalb markierter Wege; o) das Campieren; p) das Entfachen von Feuer."Schutzverordnung Altstätten, art. 10 para. 2, on Naturschutzgebiete.

So the commune did write a camping ban. It sits in art. 10, on nature reserves, as letter o of a sixteen-item list running from buildings and caravans through drainage and fertiliser to disturbing wildlife. The drafter knew exactly how to forbid a tent, an unauthorised walk off the path and an open fire, and did so in one breath. Then attached all of it to the Naturschutzgebiete. Neither parcel covering this summit is one, and I am not going to quote you a distance to the nearest, because both parcels here are building plots of 275 and 340 square metres and an extract that small cannot measure it honestly.⁴

The special ordinance turns out to be about plants. The Spezielle Schutzverordnung at the pin is a cantonal decree of 2 July 1974 establishing the Pflanzenschutzgebiet Hoher Kasten, Kamor, Schwämme, Chienberg, a protected area running along the Appenzell Innerrhoden and St. Gallen border. Its art. 2 is one sentence: "Geschützt sind sämtliche Pflanzen im Schutzgebiet", all plants in the area are protected, with ordinary alpine and forestry use reserved. It protects vegetation. It contains no camping provision and no access ban.⁵

Above all of it, federal landscape inventory object 1612 "Säntisgebiet" covers the summit. The BLN binds federal and cantonal authorities when they take decisions; it is not a prohibition addressed to a walker. The rest of the federal sweep is empty: no game reserve, no wildlife rest zone, no mire, no dry meadow, no amphibian object, no park of national importance, all checked against a positive control and an invalid-layer control that errors rather than coming back empty.¹

Then you get to the top and there is a restaurant on it

Having established that no rule forbids the night, here is why the answer is still don't.

And the ground says the same thing. Sampled on the federal terrain model over a 600-metre box, 961 points: the slope at the pin is 15.9 degrees, the steepest sample is 76.8, and only 5 of 841 evaluated samples come in under 7 degrees. Of those five, the flattest, 4.3 degrees at 1'790.9 metres, sits 28 metres from the summit and 29 metres from a building. That is the restaurant's terrace. There is one genuinely flat, genuinely private patch and it belongs to somebody's business.⁶

Where the real ground is. Requiring at least 150 metres of clearance from every registered building leaves four candidates, the best of them 4.3 degrees at 1'649.7 metres, LV95 2'755'062 / 1'238'716, WGS84 47.281112 N / 9.488371 E. That is 382 metres from the summit and 144 metres below it, which is to say off the top entirely and down the south-east flank. If you want to sleep near this mountain rather than on it, that is the shape of the answer.⁶

Why this is a recommendation and not a prohibition. Everything above is about ground and buildings, not law. Nobody has forbidden a tent at this pin, and this page does not pretend otherwise. What it says is that pitching on the terrace of a working restaurant at the top of a cable car, in full view of four front doors, is not wild camping in any sense the word usefully carries, and that the alternative involves going down. The Alpine Club's one-night tolerance does not rescue it either: that guidance is written for ground above the treeline and outside protected areas, and the obstacle here is neither altitude nor a perimeter but the buildings.⁷⁸

What the mountain is genuinely good for is the ridge. The traverse from the Hoher Kasten towards the Kamor and on along the Appenzell and St. Gallen border is one of the better walks in the Alpstein foothills, the plant protection area it crosses is the reason the flora is worth looking at, and nothing in any of the instruments above touches your boots on a marked path.⁵

The place

Summit: WGS84 47.283691 N / 9.485032 E, LV95 2'754'802 / 1'238'996, 1'793.5 m on the federal terrain model, commune of Altstätten, canton St. Gallen, at the south-eastern end of the Alpstein above the Rhine valley. The cadastral parcel is 30070 and covers 275 m²; the neighbouring parcel 20422 covers 340 m².²

The cantonal border is the detail worth carrying: the Hauptgipfel is St. Gallen, while the Kabinenbahn and its station sit in Appenzell Innerrhoden, Schwende-Rüte, roughly 74 metres away. If you look this mountain up and find Appenzell rules, you have found the rules for the lift, not for the summit. Whether that matters for a night out is moot here, since neither canton's instruments forbid one, but it matters for anything else you read about the place.¹

One thing I will not pretend to have measured: how far it is to the nearest Naturschutzgebiet, where art. 10 does forbid camping. The two parcels covering this summit are building plots of 275 and 340 square metres, and a cadastral extract for a plot that size cannot tell you where the nearest reserve begins. If you descend to look for ground, that is a question to settle on the communal protection plan rather than from this page.

Where you can legally sleep

• Not on the summit, though not because of a rule: four registered buildings stand within 54 m and the only sub-7-degree ground up there is 29 m from one of them⁷.
• Not on the restaurant terrace, which is what the flattest reading in the whole box actually is⁶.
• Lower and off the top, 382 m south-east and 144 m down, 4.3 degrees at 1'649.7 m, clear of every registered building⁶.
• Not in a Naturschutzgebiet wherever you land: art. 10 para. 2 of this ordinance forbids camping, unauthorised walking off marked paths and open fire in those zones⁴.
• With the landowner's word, which below the summit means an alp rather than a lift company.

General rules for wild camping

This summit has no camping rule because nobody needed to write one: there is nowhere to pitch and a restaurant watching. The list below matters on the way down, where the ground opens up and the protection plan starts to have opinions.

• 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 the summit parcel forbids camping, which is a scan result read against the same ordinance's express ban for a different zone type. A commune or a court could read art. 8's protection purpose more broadly than I have. The distance to the nearest Naturschutzgebiet is deliberately not stated because the parcels here are too small for the extract to measure it. The terrain half rests on the federal model on a 20-metre grid, which describes the shape of a mountain rather than the single flat stone you might find on it. 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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