Wild camping at the Tannhorn: a three-metre gap between two reserves, and still nowhere to sleep

Three prohibitions meet on one summit

Wild camping at the Tannhorn is the rare case where the pin itself is clean and the answer is still no, in every direction, for three different reasons. So it is worth walking the compass around the top rather than reading a single rule.

North, north-east and north-west: the integral reserve. Federal game reserve no. 5 is called Tannhorn, covers 1'164.7 hectares, and its boundary runs 3.0 metres north-east of the summit point. It is one of the reserves with integral protection provisions, and it takes the entire northern flank, the side that falls away towards Flühli and the Emmental. One naming oddity worth knowing: the federal inventory lists object no. 5 "Tannhorn" as a Lucerne object, because the reserve lies on the Lucerne side of the crest. The summit that carries the name is on the Bern side, just outside it.²

West, west-south-west and west-north-west: the second reserve. Game reserve no. 1 Augstmatthorn, 2'011.7 hectares, boundary 8.4 metres north-west of the summit. This one is listed as a reserve with partial protection provisions, and it takes the crest running west towards the Augstmatthorn and the Harder.²

The word "partial" is where people talk themselves into a night out, so be clear about what it does not mean. The camping ban is in Art. 5 para. 1 lit. e of the federal ordinance on game reserves, and that paragraph has no zone qualifier in it: it opens with "in the reserves the following general provisions apply" and then bans free tenting and camping, full stop. Two things in the same ordinance confirm the reading. The neighbouring lit. d does carve out "Gebiete mit partiellem Schutz" in so many words, so the drafter knew how to write that exemption and chose not to put it in lit. e. And the integral-versus-partial split is defined in Art. 9 para. 2, introduced by "for this purpose", where the purpose is population control. It does not soften the tent.¹

The federal fine, though, is routinely overstated, including by us. The ordinance that bans camping contains no penalty provision at all: its articles run to nineteen, and the last two are the repeal of earlier law and the entry into force. The CHF 20'000 everyone quotes comes from Art. 18 para. 1 of the Hunting Act, which punishes an exhaustive list of nine offences, and not one of them names camping, tents or overnighting. The closest is lit. e, disregarding measures taken to protect animals from disturbance. So the prohibition is beyond argument while the federal penalty for a tent is an inference, and the fine you can actually count on at this summit is the communal one below.¹

East, south-east, south and south-west: no reserve, and the strictest wording of the three. This is the only sector where the federal layer comes back empty, and it is all Brienz commune ground. Brienz is the commune along this ridge that decided to write the word out.

"Campieren: jede Form des Übernachtens ausserhalb dafür vorgesehener Bauten. Dazu zählen das Übernachten in Zelten, Wohnwagen, Wohnmobilen, Autos sowie das Biwakieren."Gemeindepolizeireglement of the Einwohnergemeinde Brienz, adopted 11 December 2014, Art. 4 lit. c: camping means any form of overnight stay outside buildings intended for it, including overnighting in tents, caravans, motorhomes and cars, as well as bivouacking.

Art. 5 para. 1 then forbids camping in public space, and Art. 4 lit. a defines public space to include forest and pasture under Art. 699 of the Civil Code, which is precisely what the south flank of the Tannhorn is. Art. 19 para. 1 lets the commune fine a breach with up to CHF 5'000. Note in passing that the commune's own service page describes the ban more broadly than the reglement does, and that Art. 20 para. 2 is the clause repealing the old 1967 camping regulation rather than the ban itself. Read the reglement, not the summary.³

And the summit point. The top is in neither reserve and, per the current commune boundaries, it lies in Oberried am Brienzersee. Oberried has its own Campingreglement, approved on 25 November 2005, whose Art. 3 para. 1 forbids camping outside licensed campsites with a fine up to CHF 5'000 under Art. 29 para. 2. Its one exception needs the building zone, a built-on private plot and an inhabited building with usable sanitary facilities, which a summit at 2'221 metres cannot satisfy. So even the few square metres of gap between the two reserves are covered.⁴

The bivouac question has three different answers here

Our standing question for every spot is whether a prohibition written against camping also catches a tentless bivouac, a sleeping bag and nothing pitched. On most summits that gets one answer. Here it gets three, depending on which way you stepped off the top, and it is the clearest illustration of the problem I have found anywhere in the corpus.

• South and east, in Brienz: closed. The definition names Biwakieren. There is no wording gap to argue about, and the CHF 5'000 ceiling applies to a bivvy bag exactly as to a tent.³
• West, in Oberried: open on paper, and it has two documents that both miss. The Campingreglement defines Campieren around tents, caravans, motorhomes and mobile homes "oder ähnlichen Unterkünften", similar accommodation, and a bivvy bag is not accommodation. The older Gemeindepolizeireglement bans overnighting in vehicles and tents but only on öffentlicher Grund, which on the ordinary Bernese reading means commune-managed common land, not an alpine ridge. Neither text ever says Biwakieren. The same commune, one ridge, made the opposite drafting choice from its neighbour.⁴
• North, and the whole west crest: untested federal wording. The reserve ordinance bans "freies Zelten und Campieren". A sleeping bag under the sky is not Zelten, and whether it is Campieren has never been decided for this ordinance.¹

Two of those three look like doors. Neither is one I would walk through. The Oberried gap only exists in a band a few metres wide before you are inside Augstmatthorn, where the federal wording takes over; and the federal gap you would be explaining to a gamekeeper inside a reserve created specifically to keep wildlife undisturbed, on ground where the whole point of the designation is that animals are not to be disturbed at night. The argument might be technically live. It is not a plan.

The routes that do exist, for completeness. Exceptions to the federal camping ban are a cantonal decision under the ordinance, not something a landowner can hand out. Brienz can grant an exception on application under Art. 5 para. 2 of its police reglement. Oberried's Gemeinderat can permit occasional tents outside campsites under Art. 3 para. 2, on application and with the landowner's consent: Gemischte Gemeinde Oberried am Brienzersee, 033 849 13 33, info@oberried.ch. Both provisions are built for organised groups rather than one hiker who wants a sunrise, but they are the only doors and asking costs a phone call.³⁴

What the maps say, and one trap in the official data

The summit: LV95 2'641'695 / 1'180'563, WGS84 46.774936 / 7.984555. The federal height service returns 2'220.6 metres for that point, which matches the map's 2'221.²

I did not take the reserve boundaries on trust, because "just outside a reserve" is the single most load-bearing claim this article makes. Both distances were measured by pulling the actual boundary geometry and computing the nearest point: 3.0 metres at bearing 42 degrees to the Tannhorn reserve, 8.4 metres at bearing 308 degrees to Augstmatthorn. Then I ring-sampled both the reserve layer and the commune layer at 50, 150, 400, 900 and 2'000 metres on twelve bearings, which is where the clean north/west/south split came from. Every query ran with an invalid-layer control alongside it, because an unknown layer id returns an HTTP error that reads exactly like an empty result if you are not watching for it.²

Be honest about what three metres means. A consumer GPS is not accurate to three metres, and neither is a pin dropped on a map. In practice the summit of the Tannhorn is on the boundary of an integral federal reserve. If you stood on the top and pitched a tent, no one could tell you with confidence which side of the line your groundsheet was on, and the one person likely to form a view is the gamekeeper. The reserve-free gap is a fact of the dataset, not a usable piece of ground.

The trap, stated because it nearly caught me. The swisstopo commune layer serves historical boundary years alongside the current one. Queried naively at this summit it answers "Ebligen", which was a commune in 1850 and has not existed for a long time; the record carries jahr: 1850 and is_current_jahr: false. Filter to the current year and the answer is Oberried am Brienzersee, BFS 589. Anyone checking their own spot against that layer should look at which year they were served, or they will cite a commune whose reglemente they will never find.⁵

What came back empty at the summit, each verified with controls: no wildlife rest zone, the nearest Bernese one 2'705 metres away; no BLN landscape object, nearest 3'295 metres; no raised bog, fen, floodplain or amphibian object; no park of national importance. The Moorlandschaft Habkern/Sörenberg comes closest at 433 metres north-north-west, on the Lucerne flank and already inside the integral reserve, so it changes nothing that the reserve has not already decided.²

The cantonal layer is empty too. Bern has no camping or bivouac ordinance of its own. Its one norm that writes the word Biwakieren is the wildlife protection ordinance, whose annex bans "freies/wildes Campieren und Biwakieren" in 28 named areas, and the Brienzergrat is not among them. That matters only as evidence of drafting habit: when Bern intends to catch a bivouac, it says so.⁶

One thing this spot passes that many do not. At 2'221 metres the Tannhorn is well above the local tree line, on open grass and rock, and it is a plausible place to want a night out. Our own first filter is whether anyone would sensibly sleep somewhere at all, and this summit passes it easily. That is exactly why the legal answer had to be worked out properly rather than waved away.

Where you can legally sleep

• Berghaus Tannhorn, just below the summit on the Brienz side, which is the obvious and much warmer answer to wanting to be up here at sunrise.
• Licensed campsites on the Lake Brienz shore, in Brienz and in Oberried, which is the standard that "ausserhalb von bewilligten Campingplätzen" measures you against.
• Kemmeriboden-Bad on the Emmental side, if you are crossing the ridge rather than climbing it from the lake.
• Not the summit, and not off it in any direction. North and west are federal reserves, east and south are Brienz with bivouacking named in the text, and the gap in between is Oberried, which bans it too.

General rules for wild camping

This applies wherever you are genuinely allowed to sleep outside, which on this summit means nowhere. Carry it to the places where you are: it is not legal text, but decency and common sense, and it is the reason the few remaining tolerances still exist.

• 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.

Reserve boundaries and communal reglemente change, and the Oberried document dates from 2005. Before every tour, check the current sources yourself and follow instructions on site. A genuine emergency bivouac in distress is a separate question from a planned camp, and nothing here is aimed at someone caught out by weather on a ridge. 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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