The article presents a case study of the mental usage that Alpine communities made of their mountainous environment by way of popular religious practice in a Catholic region of Eastern Switzerland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Two general tendencies were constitutive for the ways in which mountain dwellers mapped their physical environment into their religions practices: First, Tridentine Reform implied an intensification of the cult in the parish church. Potentially this reduced the amount of resources available for church rites in other parts of an often extended parish territory. Second, pilgrimages, which had been gravitated on major sanctuaries of Christendom during the Middle age, assumed an increasingly regional if not local character during the early modern period. These major tendencies were reflected in the development of regular processions that united the parishes of a particular valley and thus mapped a mountainous environment into a sacred territory. Furthermore, the study documents a multiplicity of shrines that were the object of local veneration. This is explained both by the isolation of Alpine communities and the ready availability of mechanisms producing a mental distance between the individual and his social milieu.