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BALSAM MOUNTAIN — Even the paved road up here has grass growing through it, a sign of little traffic in the wilderness above the clouds. Rhododendron and mountain laurel carpet the land in splashes of color in an otherwise dark green environment. A quiet seems to envelop us as we come to the end of the pavement and bounce twice onto the one-lane car path carved out of nature.

We’ve just entered bear country.

Massive fir trees cover the sky above us, and the deep valleys below are thick with buckeye and dead hemlock. It’s dark in here. The quiet is palpable, as if we’re not alone at all, as if we’re being watched.

We are, of course.

There are more than 4,000 black bears up here in the western North Carolina mountains and another 1,500 across the Tennessee line, numbers that have risen steadily for 30 years despite what biologists call habitat degradation and hunting laws designed to manage the populations.

They are, in fact, everywhere. They roam from the highest peaks, where they forage for hard mast from the red oak acorns, to the valleys where they live off the white oak acorns. They eventually move into the vast middle, the thicket of mountain underbrush where the soft mast from grape vines and wild cherry grows. And sometimes, they venture into the campgrounds and towns below, looking for food and finding instead a world they’re not suited for.

And vice versa.

Some 200 miles from the Smokies, a number of bear sightings are being reported in the Triad. Media announce their arrival. Warnings are issued.

Police began to take 911 calls more than a week ago. The inevitable happened when Winston-Salem police officers arrived at a scene where a bear had destroyed a bird feeder. The bear was stalked a short way then killed with rifles. The police said they couldn’t wait until it moved on or became hostile.

“I don’t think the bear was planning to stay,” said Ken Knight, a wildlife biologist for the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission. “They’re not looking to settle down in the Triad.”

Up here, where the air is thinner and the winds cooler, people live with the bears. The animals lumber in under darkness to forage through garbage, and they lumber back into the hills when they’re finished. Here on Balsam Mountain, an animal trail leads from the dirt road to the Cherokee Reservation below.

The narrow path is steep and at times almost impassable, thick vines filled with green berries hanging low to the damp ground. The only sound we hear other than birds in the trees and the faint echo of thunder somewhere in the distance is a small stream below.           

“Bears follow water,” said Kim Delozier, a biologist with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “That’s the natural corridor. And they travel as far as they need to.”

Experts believe the bears sighted in Guilford and Forsyth counties in recent weeks came down from the mountains. Delozier said it’s a natural occurrence with bear populations exploding, food supplies fluctuating and habitat shrinking. “They’re looking for food or territory,” he said.

Here in the Smokies, the reports are alarming. Trails like the one leading down to Bunches Creek have been closed, along with campsites, after the park received more reports than at any time in the past 31 years.

“We closed a campsite last week after a bear tried to dig under a tent with the people inside it screaming and yelling,” Delozier said.

A girl was killed in 2006 in a Tennessee campground, and another fatality was recorded in 2000. The attacks are rare, almost unheard of, but with bear populations increasing above and urban sprawl spreading below, there will almost certainly be more encounters in the future.

The past few autumns have produced strong mast crop yields. In other words, there’s plenty of food here in the high country, and still the bears wander out and into population centers. This is a continuing cycle that has made the bears healthier and more mobile as they await the annual rite of late summer, the yield of fruit-bearing vines and trees that draw the bears back to their natural homeland.

“The ones moving long distances in the summer are young males sowing their oats,” Knight said. “Just like young male humans do.”

Delozier said we’re due for what bear biologists call a “food failure,” in which a very low mast yield will send bears out of their natural habitat  in previously unheard of numbers.

“We’re due for a mass exodus from the Smokies,” he said. “We think they’ll go as far as they need to find food, into North Carolina and Tennessee and Georgia and even South Carolina. There are more bears now. Poaching is down. New landowners aren’t from hunting backgrounds, so they’re not letting people hunt on their land. The bears are increasing. The young males are being pushed out, so they go off in search of new territory.”

And they follow the streams and rivers and end up in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, wandering into new neighborhoods built away from the city centers, into backyards where they end up on decks and eventually, the evening news.

“A lot of it’s just sensational,” Knight said. “They make for interesting stories.”

Up here in the forest, a balancing act between man and nature plays out every day. When a bear attacks, it’s usually a tourist venturing into the bear’s domain. It’s not unlike the bears venturing into the Triad, and the results are often similar.

Deep in the gorge here below Balsam Mountain, the animal trail drops far from the road, further from common sense, further from safety. It’s dark here, and eerily quiet. No one can hear you scream in the depths of the Great Smoky Mountains. We quietly emerge from the underbrush and come to a small clearing where a stream meanders down from the rocks above.

Native brook trout swim in the clear water, undisturbed for a lifetime. In the mud beside the creek is a paw print with five distinct toes, a five-inch pad and the just-visible traces of claws.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com