Wild camping at the Sigriswiler Rothorn: banned for three months of the year, and open for the other nine

One rule decides this summit, and it has a start and an end date

Wild camping at the Sigriswiler Rothorn comes down to a single entry in the annex of a cantonal ordinance. Not a communal reglement, not a federal reserve. The summit sits inside wildlife rest zone no. 1022, Justistal, zone 1a, and the zone carries the status rechtsverbindlich, legally binding, which is worth stressing because plenty of Swiss wildlife zones are marked empfohlen, recommended, and carry no sanction at all. This one is not one of those.

"Kategorie D: Das Gebiet darf vom 1. September bis zum 30. November nur auf den bezeichneten Wegen betreten und befahren werden. Kategorie F: Das freie Campieren ist vom 1. September bis zum 30. November verboten."Verordnung über den Wildtierschutz (WTSchV, BSG 922.63), annex 2 no. 22 Justistal, zone 1a: from 1 September to 30 November the area may be entered only on the marked paths, and free camping is prohibited.

Note what the dates do. They are not decoration. Both measures carry the same window, and that window is the deer rut. Zone 1a's other two measures, a hunting ban and dogs on the lead, run all year, and neither of them has anything to do with sleeping. So the ordinance regulates camping here for ninety-one days and then stops.

The fine sits in a third act, and this chain actually closes. WTSchV itself contains no penalty article, which is the same shape as the federal game-reserve ordinance and the reason so many articles about federal reserves overstate the sanction. Here the chain is complete. The cantonal fixed-penalty ordinance lists, in its section on hunting and wildlife protection, "Missachten von Verboten in Wildschutzgebieten" at CHF 100, citing precisely WTSchV art. 3 para. 1 lit. f, which is the article that creates category F. The next line does the same for the path requirement, category D, at another CHF 100. Since you cannot camp while staying on a marked path, an autumn camper here is exposed twice.²

Above that sits art. 31 para. 1 lit. c of the cantonal hunting act, a fine of up to CHF 20'000 for disregarding binding orders for the protection of wildlife, which is what applies if the matter leaves the fixed-penalty procedure for ordinary proceedings. Quote that number only with its context. The realistic figure is CHF 100.

And unusually, there is somebody there to issue it. At several spots we have researched the honest answer was that no one on the ground has the power to fine anyone. Bern is the opposite. Art. 27 of the hunting act makes gamekeepers the primary supervisory organ, states expressly that the supervisory organs are part of the prosecution authorities, and gives them the right to impose and collect fixed penalties themselves. Cantonal and communal police are the subsidiary option, not the first one.²

The trap in the official map, worth knowing if you check this yourself. The federal wildlife-rest-zone portal shows this zone with the summary "Wegegebot, Leinenpflicht". Paths and dogs. The camping ban does not appear in that summary field at all; it lives in the ordinance annex and in a longer notes field the map popup does not display. Anyone who checks the official portal and stops there will conclude that camping is unregulated in September. It is not.³

The nine months, the ten metres, and the bivouac question

Nine months of the year, this is simply a place you may sleep. That is not a loophole, it is what the sources say when you check all three levels rather than assuming. Every federal inventory layer is empty at this point: no game reserve, no BLN object, no mire, floodplain or amphibian site, no park. Canton Bern has no camping ordinance of general application, which I can now say from an enumeration rather than a failed search: all 704 cantonal acts in force were pulled and searched, and not one of them contains the word Campieren or Biwak in its article text. And the commune of Sigriswil publishes 148 documents, has neither a police reglement nor a camping reglement, and its only sentence pairing "campsite" with "prohibited" is a zoning rule about laying out campsite installations in sport-and-leisure zones. That is not a rule about a person sleeping on a summit.³⁴⁵

The ten metres, and why it is not the plan it looks like. The zone boundary runs over the summit crest. I pulled the polygon and computed the nearest edge directly: 10.6 metres, bearing 223 degrees, south-west. Ring-sampling on twelve bearings puts you outside at 25 metres to the west and south-west, while north and east stay inside for hundreds of metres. So on paper there is legal ground a stone's throw from the summit cross in September.

In practice, do not build an autumn night on it. A perimeter digitised from older survey material is not accurate to ten metres, a consumer GPS is not either, and the person who will form a view about which side of the line your tent is on is a gamekeeper who works that valley. If you want the south-west shoulder in October, the honest advice is to ask first, not to measure.

Does the ban catch a bivouac with no tent? This is where the Justistal entry turns out to be genuinely unusual, and I want to be precise because our own earlier articles have generalised here. The Bernese annex now contains 28 areas with a category F camping clause. 27 of them read "Freies/wildes Campieren und Biwakieren sind verboten". Justistal is the only one that says camping alone, and the only one with a season.

Tempting as that gap is, the version history takes most of the air out of it. Justistal was the first camping clause in the entire annex and for six years the only one, written in 2018 before the canton settled on the "camping and bivouacking" formula it used for the other 27 in its 2024 revisions. The canton then simply never went back and re-worded Justistal. So the gap is a drafting legacy rather than a deliberate exception for people in bivvy bags.

And in season it is moot anyway, because of category D. Whatever "free camping" means, the same entry says you may not leave the marked paths between 1 September and 30 November. A bivouac is necessarily off the path. So from September to November the tentless night is caught either way, and nothing turns on what you sleep under.¹

There is a sign on the way up, and it says ask rather than no. On the meadow at the Unterbergli junction a notice tells walkers that wild camping is not a good idea here and that asking permission before pitching is strongly recommended, and it gives the reason: a bull grazes that meadow at night alongside the cows. That is a landholder's framing worth respecting on its own terms. It is also, as far as I can find, the only camping-related sign anywhere on this ascent.⁶

No fee exists, and I looked. There is no Fälensee-style arrangement here, no honesty box, no rate people mention for pitching on the Sigriswilergrat alps. I am not going to invent one. The alps below the summit are nine separate cooperatives on the Justistal side plus one private alp on the walking side, and none of their pastures reaches the summit anyway: grazing tops out around 1'460 to 1'620 metres and the wild-hay ground stops at the rock walls below the summit massif. The top itself is bare karst that belongs to nobody's summer economy.⁶

What the maps and the ground actually say

The summit: LV95 2'625'365 / 1'175'559, WGS84 46.730747 / 7.770470, and the federal height service returns 2'051.2 metres for it.³

What came back empty, and why the empties count. No federal game reserve, no BLN object, no mire landscape, raised bog, fen, floodplain or amphibian site, no dry grassland, no forest reserve, no park of national importance. Each of those queries ran alongside a deliberately invalid layer id, which returns HTTP 400. That control is not a formality: three of the layer ids I started with were stale and were returning that same HTTP 400, which reads exactly like an empty result. Only after correcting them does an empty answer mean absence. The single hit anywhere in the stack is the wildlife rest zone.³

Step 0, the question we ask before the law: would anyone sleep here? Yes, and the terrain says so plainly. Sampling the elevation model outward from the summit, the north and north-east drop away by nearly ninety metres within twenty metres of the top, which matches every description of the north-east face as near vertical. The south and south-west lose one to seven metres over the first thirty. That shoulder is the pitch: a pocket of karst twenty to thirty metres across, well above the tree line, big enough for two or three small tents. It is not a theoretical pitch either. One published tour report describes pitching ten metres below the top, and another describes arriving to find a tent already there and a second one turning up later the same evening.⁷

The real constraint here is not the law, it is water. This is Schrattenkalk karst and the water sinks: every watercourse within a kilometre and a half is intermittent, and the nearest mapped drinking water is 833 metres away to the north-west and some 480 metres below. Both first-hand accounts I found confirm it from opposite directions, one party melting snow on the summit in May, another carrying three litres for the whole trip in a twenty-kilo pack in September. Carry everything you will drink.⁸

And know what else is happening in those three months. The Justistal is one of the best-known deer-rut valleys in the canton, and the ban window is the rut window. Local reporting describes up to fifty cars at the valley entrance on an autumn Friday evening and a scene closer to a public event than to wildlife watching, which is exactly why the canton tightened the rules in 2018 and put up information boards. The practical consequence for a tent on this summit in October is not subtle: you are pitched above a valley full of people with spotting scopes pointed at these flanks, and the gamekeeper is out there too.⁷

Getting there: most people start at Schwanden, Säge, at 1'076 metres, the bus terminus, signposted three and a half hours. The tourist board's own route table gives four hours from Sigriswil village via Oberbärgli and warns that the summit is only for the surefooted with a head for heights. There is also a curiosity on the mountain worth a head torch: the Schafloch, an unlit wartime tunnel around six hundred metres long that runs clean through the massif.⁸

Where you can legally sleep

• The summit itself, from 1 December to 31 August. The south-west shoulder, late up and early away, with all your water carried. Nothing in federal, cantonal or communal law prohibits it in those months.
• Not the summit from 1 September to 30 November, and not off the marked paths anywhere in the zone in that window either.
• Unteres Bergli or the alps on the way up, in season, if you ask. The sign on the meadow asks exactly that, and the hut is right there.
• Campsites and hotels around the Thunersee, in Sigriswil, Gunten and Merligen, which is the fallback if the weather on the ridge turns, and it turns fast up there.

General rules for wild camping

This applies wherever you are allowed to sleep outside, and on this summit that is nine months of the year. It is not legal text, it is decency and common sense, and on a mountain whose one rule exists to keep deer undisturbed in the rut 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.

Wildlife rest zone perimeters and their measures change, and this one was last revised in 2018 while the ordinance annex was revised twice in 2024. Before every tour, check the current perimeter and season on the official portal, read the annex rather than the map summary, 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.

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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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