NATURE LOVERS, ENVIRONMENTALISTS and outdoors enthusiasts will all greet the new Etowah Water Trail website (www.etowahwatertrail.org) with well-deserved applause. However, it is stay-at-home types and those who love where they live without necessarily wanting to count mussels or go fishing that should really drool. This is the next best thing to being right there on the Etowah, from where it is born high in the Northeast Georgia mountains to where, 163 miles later, it joins the Oostanaula in downtown Rome to become the Coosa.

The Coosa River Basin Initiative organization that put this together, with funding from Lyndhurst Foundation in Chattanooga, really has accomplished something special with this one. The interactive map alone is worth the price of admission (free) even without all the photos and information on all possible stops along the way provided, including the best fishing holes.

This is a remarkable informational package that the University of Georgia Press plans to release as a guidebook this coming spring.

The Etowah is a remarkable river constantly threatened because it runs through the heart of a densely populated (by humans, not just mussels) area. This more than does it justice and will do much to help inform couch/computer potatoes of what is there that they have been told about but never really seen.

And the CRBI is also to be commended for not trying to ram its environmental message to the forefront. It has apparently figured out what not all of the green persuasion have learned: The best argument is in showing the general public what is at stake.