Wild camping on the Leistchamm: the rule allows it, the mountain does not

The same ordinance bans tents twice, and not here

Wild camping on the Leistchamm turns on which zone you are standing in, and Amden's protection ordinance is unusually clear about the difference.

What the cadastre returns at the pin. The St. Gallen cadastre of public-law restrictions carries 1'568 restrictions on this parcel, 1'544 of them with surface geometry. Point-in-polygon at the summit returns four: a Lebensraum Kerngebiet LR K, the cantonal Waldreservat Amden, the base designation "übriges Gemeindegebiet" and noise sensitivity level III. The cadastre also names which communal act is in force for the core habitat, which is how I knew what to read.²

The zone article, in full. Art. 6 para. 2 of the Schutzverordnung Amden opens with a general clause and then lists what it means: activities and events during the breeding season, buildings and installations, fertiliser and chemicals, agricultural intensification, installations promoting the area for recreation, disturbing or killing wildlife, and quarries or landfills. Seven letters, a to g. Camping is not one of them.³

"h) das Anfachen von Feuer, das Lagern, Zelten, Campieren sowie das Überlassen von Standplätzen dafür;"Schutzverordnung Amden, art. 10 para. 2 lit. h, on biotopes.

That sentence exists in the same ordinance. So does this one, from art. 13 on buffer zones: "das Zelten, Campieren sowie das Überlassen von Standplätzen dafür." The drafter knew the formula, wrote it out twice, and attached it to biotopes and buffer strips. In the article governing the core habitat where the Leistchamm summit sits, it does not appear. An omission that a document contradicts twice in its own pages is not an oversight.⁴

How far away those zones actually are. This is where a distance ranking beats a yes-or-no query. Measured against every restriction on the parcel, the nearest buffer zone is 1'386 metres from the summit and the nearest nature-reserve biotope 3'201 metres. Neither of the two camping bans in this ordinance comes close to the top.²

What the zone does forbid, and it is not nothing. Art. 6 para. 2 is a general clause: prohibited are actions that impair the core habitat, and the seven letters are examples rather than an exhaustive list. Letter a is the one to diary: all sporting and social events and activities between 15 March and 1 July, the breeding and calving season. Paragraph 3 pulls in the landscape-protection rules, paragraph 4 requires dogs on the lead, and art. 27 makes breaches punishable by detention or a fine, negligent as well as deliberate. So the honest reading is not "anything goes". It is that nobody has prohibited a tent here, while quite a lot of other things are prohibited and a general clause sits over all of it.³⁵

The other two hits do not add a ban. The Waldreservat Amden is a cantonal forest reserve, and the instrument behind it is a compensation contract between the forest owner and the canton: parties, reserve objectives, silvicultural measures, payment, entry in the land register. It contains no reference to tents, camping, fires or access at all. Above it, federal landscape inventory BLN 1613, "Speer, Churfirsten, Alvier", covers the summit; the BLN binds authorities when they act and is not a prohibition aimed at a walker with a bivvy bag.⁵¹

Then you get to the top and there is nowhere to lie down

I spent a while on the wording above, and the terrain reading took it all away in one line.

There was no water to mask here, which is worth saying because it is the usual trap at lake spots and it does not apply on a dry limestone crest. The most repeated elevation in the whole grid appears three times, so nothing is being flattened into a false plane and the numbers are what the mountain actually does.⁶

So the practical answer is short. The Leistchamm is the western end of the Churfirsten and it behaves like it: a steep grass and limestone crest that drops hard towards the Walensee. You cannot sleep on the summit because there is no ground to sleep on, not because someone forbade it. That is a different sentence from the one most people expect, and it is the true one.

If you want a night in this area anyway, two things follow from the sections above. Go where the ground is, which means leaving the summit block entirely, and then check what you have walked into: the two zones of this same ordinance that do ban tents start 1'386 and 3'201 metres out, and they are exactly the kind of flat, damp, interesting ground that looks inviting at dusk. And keep the calendar in mind. Between 15 March and 1 July the core habitat is closed to sporting activity, which is the part of this ordinance most likely to actually concern you.³²

What the mountain is good for is the walk. Nothing in the core-habitat article touches your boots on a path, the ridge from Amden over the Leistchamm is one of the better days out above the Walensee, and the view down to the lake is the reason the whole area is in the federal landscape inventory in the first place.¹

The place

Summit: WGS84 47.146020 N / 9.213233 E, LV95 2'734'591 / 1'223'193, 2'101.3 m on the federal terrain model, commune of Amden, canton St. Gallen, at the western end of the Churfirsten chain above the north shore of the Walensee.⁶

The federal sweep at the pin returns one hit and a long row of blanks: BLN object 1613, "Speer, Churfirsten, Alvier". Game reserves, wildlife rest zones, floodplains, raised bogs, fens, mire landscapes, amphibian sites, dry meadows, waterbird reserves and parks of national importance all come back empty. Those blanks were verified with a positive control that returns game reserve no. 3 Kiental and an invalid-layer control that errors with HTTP 400 rather than returning nothing, so an empty answer means absence.¹

Around the summit the cadastre thickens quickly, which is worth knowing if you plan to descend and sleep: the nearest natural forest reserve with no active intervention is 101 metres away, a potential watercourse space 128 metres, forest 375 metres, a mire landscape 573 metres and a geotope protection area 597 metres. The Leistchamm sits on the edge of a dense protection mosaic rather than in open country.²

One thing I will not pretend to settle: how the commune would read its own general clause if someone did pitch a tent up here. Art. 6 para. 2 prohibits actions that impair the core habitat and leaves the list open, and I am not going to invent a ruling nobody has made. What I can tell you is that the specific word for what you would be doing appears twice in this ordinance and never in the article that governs this ground.

Where you can legally sleep

• Not on the summit, for the simplest reason there is: 39.7 degrees at the pin and nothing under 7 degrees within 400 metres⁶.
• Not between 15 March and 1 July anywhere in the core habitat, where all sporting activity is prohibited during the breeding and calving season³.
• Not in the buffer zones or the biotopes, 1'386 m and 3'201 m out, where this ordinance names tenting and camping expressly⁴.
• Outside the protection mosaic and above the treeline, where the Alpine Club's one-night guidance applies and the ground is not listed⁷.
• With the landowner's word wherever you land, which on these alps is the answer that actually settles it.

General rules for wild camping

The Leistchamm keeps its silence on camping because nobody has needed to write it down. That holds only as long as the behaviour holds, and on a ridge closed to sporting activity for three and a half months of the year it holds more narrowly 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 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 rests on the absence of a word in one article of a communal ordinance, read against its presence in two others. That is a strong reading but it is a reading, and art. 6 para. 2 contains a general clause whose reach a commune or a court could interpret more broadly than I have. The terrain half rests on the federal model on a 20-metre grid, which describes the shape of a mountain and not the single flat stone you might find on it. Distances are measured against published polygons, not markers in the terrain. 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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