Gets thinner

Usage examples of balds.

We walked up mountains and through high, forgotten hollows, along lonesome ridges with long views of more ridges, over grassy balds and down rocky, twisting, jarring descents, and through mile after endless mile of dark, deep, silent woods, on a wandering trail eighteen inches wide and marked with rectangular white blazes (two inches wide, six long) slapped at intervals on the grey-barked trees.

No one knows why the balds are there, or how long they have existed, or why they appear on some mountains but not others.

Ninety plant species have disappeared from the balds since the park was opened in the 1930s.

I am almost certain that if that $200 million a year were restored to the budget, nearly all of it would go into building more parking lots and RV hookups, not into saving trees and certainly not into restoring the precious, lovely grassy balds.

He often passed small farms and cabins or found graziers tending herds on sunny balds.

And so we walked, hour upon hour, over rollercoaster hills, along kinife-edge ridges and over grassy balds, through depthless ranks of oak, ash, chinkapin, and pine.

Or consider the grassy balds--treeless, meadowy expanses of mountaintop, up to 250 acres in extent, which are quite unique to the southern Appalachians.

The only time that stream would ever be strong enough to carry a body was during the second week of spring thaw when the runoff from the balds and Coastal Ranges was at its height—Drey knew that.

It was only yesterday morning, when they'd finally crossed over the balds and into the clanholds, that the temperature had begun to rise above freezing.

Three summers ago he and Drey had come across a pair of elk carcasses at the foot of the balds: bodies head to head, torsos picked clean, antlers locked together so surely that neither animal had been able to free itself from the other's hold.

Two summers ago Drey and Rory Gleet had returned from a ten-day hunting trip to the balds doubled up with cramps and indigestion.

To the south, the rocky balds and escarpments that formed the tail end of the Bitter Hills cast dark, shifting shadows upon the water.

Emerging upon a hilltop not unlike the balds found in the higher mountains, I drew back against the wall of trees, letting my soiled buckskins merge with the tree trunks and brush, scanning the vast stretch of land that lay before me.

He who walked in the shadows among the laurel sticks and stood alone on the balds when the sun was rising?