Hikes for a night in a tent

A selection of hikes that lend themselves well to a night in a tent.

Wild camping in the mountains is a subtle practice: not always legal, often tolerated, hardly ever comfortable, but when it works, it is among the most intense experiences you can have.

In general, we recommend always camping above 2,000 metres, away from mountain huts or other buildings, on grassy flats with springs nearby and in landscapes worth a night outdoors (on the shore of an alpine lake, on a knoll with a view, or on a high plateau). It is essential to have a thorough knowledge of the mountains and of your own technical gear, and it bears repeating: the mountains at night are much colder than you think, and even in summer you need sleeping bags rated to 0 or 5 degrees.

And the basic rules: discretion, no fires, leave at dawn and zero visual or environmental impact.

This selection is not designed specifically for camping, but it gathers routes that lend themselves well to a trip with a tent, for their setting, altitude, greenery and streams, distance from mountain huts, and the absence of specific bans (many national parks, for example, strictly prohibit camping).

The rules, region by region

The rules change at every border, and sometimes at every municipality. In the Aosta Valley wild camping is not permitted, but regional law allows bivouacking in a tent above 2,500 metres from sunset to sunrise: one night only, with the tent pitched in the evening and struck in the morning, while staying several days in the same place counts as camping. In the Gran Paradiso National Park, on the other hand, tents are banned everywhere outside designated areas, which is a good example of park regulations being stricter than regional law. Elsewhere in Italy it pays to check region by region and often municipality by municipality, because local ordinances change and are not always easy to find.

In Switzerland the Swiss Alpine Club generally regards sites above the tree line as environmentally acceptable, but excludes protected areas where camping is forbidden or access is restricted, such as the National Park, nature reserves, federal hunting reserves and wildlife rest zones, all of which can be checked on the federal map at map.geo.admin.ch. Cantons and municipalities can add restrictions of their own, and alpine pastures are private land, so asking the herder before you pitch is always a good idea. Specialist guides speak of a single night in one place and small groups, which is the spirit of a bivouac rather than a campsite, and this applies to the Aletsch as much as to Bregaglia and Poschiavo: the rules vary and must be checked before you set off.