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Wild camping and bivouac on the Tour du Mont Blanc

Short version: a bivouac is permitted on parts of the Tour du Mont Blanc, in narrow conditions, and banned outright on others. Where it is permitted, it is usually one night only, between about 19:00 and 09:00, above a stated altitude or outside a mapped red zone, and increasingly with a booking. Wild camping in the ordinary sense - pitching for a day or more, in a place of your choosing - is not legal anywhere on the loop.

Last checked: 27 August 2026. Bivouac rules on the TMB are set at commune, reserve, region and canton level, and several of them are re-issued every spring with new dates and new boundaries. Each section below carries the instrument it rests on and that instrument's own date.

Bivouac and wild camping are not the same thing

The distinction matters because it is the one the French orders use. La Chamoniarde, the mountain-safety association for the Chamonix valley, defines it in its published TMB accommodation guide: a bivouac is sleeping under the stars or in a tent, from sunset to daybreak, one night in one place, leaving no trace and lighting no fire. Wild camping is sleeping several days in the same place outside a laid-out area. Almost every rule below permits some version of the first and prohibits the second.

French section

Les Contamines-Montjoie nature reserve

The binding instrument is Haute-Savoie prefectoral order DDT-2026-0474, which the prefecture published in June 2026. It replaces order DDT-2025-0739 of 12 June 2025, which had covered only the Jovet lakes, and it was issued on the request of the commune of Les Contamines-Montjoie dated 12 May 2026 to extend the regime to the whole reserve.

What Article 1 says, from 15 June to 15 September:

Article 2 bans swimming and boating on the reserve's lakes and water bodies all year, dogs included. Article 6 sets the order's validity to 31 December 2026, so it is a season-by-season instrument and a 2027 replacement should be expected. Article 7 refers breaches to the penalties at R. 332-69 to R. 332-81 of the Code de l'environnement.

One point of care: the text of DDT-2026-0474 sets capacities for the two areas but does not itself state a reservation requirement. La Chamoniarde's guide directs walkers to declare the La Balme site on the Haute-Savoie bivouac platform run by Asters, the reserve manager. Treat the two areas as bookable in practice and check the platform before relying on a pitch.

Instrument date: 2026. Checked 27 August 2026.

The Aiguilles Rouges, Carlaveyron and Vallon de Berard reserves

This is the stretch above Chamonix that the TMB uses between Tre-le-Champ and Planpraz, including the Lac Blanc and Cheserys area and the Brevent. The instrument is Haute-Savoie prefectoral order DDT-2026-0472, covering the three national nature reserves together and naming the communes of Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, Vallorcine and Les Houches in its execution clause. It replaces order DDT 2025-820 of 22 May 2025, and it follows the reserves' consultative committee of 20 January 2026, which asked for the season to run from 1 June to 30 September.

What Article 1 says, from 1 June to 30 September 2026:

The order also carries two notes for information, about ground just outside the reserves. Bivouac is tolerated in the Vallon de Berard, in the sector of the Pierre a Berard refuge, capped at 15 tents, and you must contact the refuge. Bivouac is tolerated at the Bellachat refuge, capped at 15 tents, with reservation directly with the guardian.

Article 2 bans all aquatic activity in the Cheserys lakes and Lac Blanc over the same period.

Instrument date: 2026, running to 30 September 2026. Checked 27 August 2026.

Chamonix-Mont-Blanc

Camping and bivouac have been banned across the whole commune since 1992, per La Chamoniarde's guide. The only derogation is a bivouac at altitude, between sunset and sunrise. The guide points walkers instead at the campsites in Chamonix, Argentiere, Les Bois and Les Bossons. Note that the altitude derogation does not override the reserve order above: inside the Aiguilles Rouges reserves, DDT-2026-0472 governs.

Commune rule as published by La Chamoniarde, 2025 edition. Checked 27 August 2026.

Les Houches

Bivouac is tolerated from sunset to sunrise, for one night, per the same guide. Les Houches is also named in the execution clause of DDT-2026-0472, so the reserve rules bind inside the reserve boundary.

Commune rule as published by La Chamoniarde, 2025 edition. Checked 27 August 2026.

Vallorcine

The most explicit of the commune rules, and the one worth reading closely if you are walking the Col des Montets stage. Per La Chamoniarde: wild camping and campfires are strictly prohibited day and night across the whole commune. Bivouac outside the nature reserves is permitted with the landowner's authorisation, for one night, from 19:00 at the earliest until 09:00 the next morning at the latest. Above 1,700 m, that authorisation is granted as a matter of course.

Commune rule as published by La Chamoniarde, 2025 edition. Checked 27 August 2026.

Vallee des Glaciers and Les Chapieux

This is the Savoie side of the loop, between Col de la Seigne and Les Chapieux, and it sits outside Haute-Savoie, so the prefectoral orders above do not reach it. La Chamoniarde's guide states the position for Bourg-Saint-Maurice: there is an official bivouac area at Les Chapieux, with sanitation and waste collection, and the whole Vallee des Glaciers is alpine pasture and private property, so bivouac is not permitted there.

That ban rests on land status and the commune's own position as reported in the guide, not on a prefectoral order we have been able to read. Some coverage attributes it to DDT-2026-0474; that order is a Haute-Savoie instrument about the Contamines-Montjoie reserve and does not cover the Vallee des Glaciers.

Commune position as published by La Chamoniarde, 2025 edition. Not confirmed against a commune order. Checked 27 August 2026.

Saint-Gervais

Saint-Gervais is not covered in the guide we hold and we have no commune order for it. Treat it as unverified rather than as permitted.

Italian section

Courmayeur has published a bilingual notice stating that wild camping and bivouacking are not permitted along the Tour du Mont Blanc trails in the Courmayeur area, Autonomous Region of Aosta Valley, and directing walkers to campsites, mountain huts, hotels and other accommodation.

La Chamoniarde's guide states the regional position more broadly: all forms of stationing or encampment are prohibited on the territory of the Aosta Valley, even for periods of under twenty-four hours, and bivouac is prohibited below 2,500 m, which is very nearly the whole of the Valdotain ground the TMB crosses. A fixed penalty applies to breaches. The guide lists campsites in Val Veny and the Italian Val Ferret, all of them off the GR line.

The practical reading of the Italian section is the simplest on the loop: plan a roof.

Courmayeur notice, primary. Regional rule as published by La Chamoniarde, 2025 edition. Checked 27 August 2026.

Swiss section

Bivouac and wild camping are prohibited in Switzerland as a general rule. La Chamoniarde's guide gives the exceptions as sleeping one night, not in a group, above the treeline, or in an emergency. The Valais communes the TMB crosses have their own positions:

So the Swiss section is not an unregulated stretch. It is a stretch where the legal pitch is a named site, and on the busiest nights those sites fill in the same way the dormitories do.

Commune rules as published by La Chamoniarde, 2025 edition. Checked 27 August 2026.

What we could not verify

Being straight about the gaps is part of the point of this page.

The question underneath the question

Most people who search this are not looking for a wilderness experience. They are looking at a booking board where the huts on their dates are full, and they are working out whether a tent is a way around it.

Read back through the sections above and the answer is that it mostly is not, and it is becoming less of one each season. The two French reserve orders both moved in the same direction in 2026: fixed zones, fixed capacities, fixed hours, and on the Aiguilles Rouges side a compulsory booking. Italy prohibits it below 2,500 m. Switzerland allows it at named sites that are themselves finite. The tent has become a second booking system with fewer places in it, not an escape from the first one.

Which means the useful move is to go back and solve the original problem properly.

Solve the beds and the question dissolves

The reason a TMB looks unbookable is almost never that every bed on the route is taken. It is that the nights are being searched one hut at a time. The tour is a chain: you need consecutive nights in trail order, and a hut with space on the wrong night is not a bed. Searched that way, a loop that looks closed on the first three huts often opens on a start date two days either side, or on a variant stage, or on a hut half an hour off the waymarked line.

HutScanner checks the huts' own booking calendars daily and searches for runs of huts with space on consecutive nights, in trail order, at a pace you set. The Tour du Mont Blanc region page has the stages and the map, and the daily availability page shows what a bookable loop looks like right now and on the dates ahead. Booking is done directly with each hut, on its own system, and the reference each hut issues is the one that counts.

Sources

Primary instruments where they exist; published guidance where they do not.

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