The rhetoric in the growing battle over protecting the nation's roadless backcountry will heat up over the next few months, but sportsmen who want to understand what's really at stake should go to the new website www.oursportingheritage.com. Launched earlier this year by Trout Unlimited and supported by a coalition of national hunting and fishing groups, it does an excellent job of spelling out what sportsmen could lose, who is behind the effort to open up roadless areas, and exposing the weaknesses of their arguments.

The site includes information every sportsman needs to know, including the specifics of the bill that would release tens of millions of acres of the finest trophy-hunting and fishing areas left in the nation; an interactive map showing all western roadless areas; featured roadless areas listed by state; a list of news articles and columns from outdoor writers at newspapers across the west opposing the release, and tools to get involved in protecting the backcountry and our sporting heritage.

I’m lucky to spend a lot of my time with all kinds of people, from ranchers and tactical firearms instructors to conservation leaders, from liberals to libertarians. I like conflict and argument, and I’ve never been the kind of person who thought that everybody should agree, or that my friendship with anybody depended upon us agreeing on every issue.

I’ve tried hard to understand the objection some hunters have to roadless areas and wilderness, but so far I have not been able to do that. I spend as much time as possible with my kids in roadless areas, and most of my best hunting and fishing experiences have been in those kinds of places, designated wilderness, or not.

Ten years or so ago, a good friend of mine made a movie called The Naturalist, about an eccentric wanderer of Arkansas’ Buffalo River country. Kent Bonar, the subject of the film, was raised in the woods by his grandfather and a bunch of old-time coon hunters and hound dog men.

Bonar has remained true to the tradition. He keeps a half dozen hunting dogs, doesn’t drive, lives in a falling down house in the woods, and spends his days walking, carrying a light pack, a falling axe, a pistol and his pencils and paper, pausing to sketch and describe every aspect of the plants, animals and fish of this country where he was born, raised and chose to never leave. Bonar is an artist of the first order (although he stoutly rejects the term “artist,” saying he just draws what’s already there) and is also known, these days, as “the John Muir of the Ozarks.” He’s a fierce and irreverent advocate for conserving the Buffalo River country.

When it comes to fish, wildlife and public lands, the new House budget pushed through by the GOP reminds me of the old football cheer: "Hit- 'em again, hit 'em again — Harder! Harder!

" That's right, the elected representatives that led last year's unprecedented attack on fish and wildlife and hunting and fishing are back swinging the same sticks — only harder.

The bill House Budget Chief Paul Ryan, R-WI, authored and steered to passage on a party-line vote, takes spending on conservation programs that support a healthy environment and outdoors sports to even lower levels than it had plunged last year.

In April last year, I drove through a blizzard and below-zero temperatures to fish with some friends and make the first video of the Native Trout Adventures Series for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. The Conservationist covered the story here. That post was about a hoped–for new version of the planning rule that governs the use and management of our National Forest lands, a version that would protect the wildlife and fish habitat, the headwaters of our major watersheds, and give sportsman a clear way to express their concerns over everything from road closures to timber sales, fishing access and hunting and shooting opportunities.

(TRCP’s Native Trout Adventures video. I recommend the whole series, if you have time.)

This year, as April Fool’s day approaches, I’ve just come in from working with my 16-week-old Lab pup. The creek is ice-free. The only snow left is piled on the shady north side of my house, and I left my gloves behind on the kitchen table and didn’t even notice.

I left Alabama when I was in my mid-twenties, to live and work in the West. I never planned to stay gone this long. People I grew up with, hunting and fishing friends, school friends, and extended family sometimes ask me why I’ve stayed here in Montana, and why I am raising my children here, so far from the rivers and creeks I grew up on, from the hardwood bottoms and flat-top foothills of the southern Cumberland Mountains that were and are so important to me. I’ve thought a lot about how to answer that question.

The answer boils down to public lands, and the freedom they offer to people like us, who are of somewhat less than moderate means, and who live, when the work is done, to fish and hunt and shoot and wander.

I mostly grew up in the country, and at a time when there were few whitetail deer. Small game hunting was the obsession, and access to that kind of hunting was not usually a problem. You could leave home with a pocket full of 20 gauge shells, from high brass 4s to low brass 8s, and come home with a squirrel, dove, snipe, quail (they disappeared around 1984), a rabbit, even a teal if you were lucky. By the time I went away to work and college, all that land was leased for deer hunting, or posted by the owners.

Covering conservation news recently has been like working the obituary beat at a newspaper: You spend your days reporting about good things passing away. And while that's not much fun to write about, I know some readers are tempted to quit and seek grief counseling.

That's why it's important to revisit the news from recent weeks. Not only was there a string of victories for conservationists, but sportsmen's groups played pivotal roles in many of them.

• The RESTORE Act passed a major hurdle in the Senate. If blessed by the House and signed by President Obama, this means 80 percent of Clean Water Act fines resulting from the Deepwater Horizon disaster will be spent on restoring the Gulf Coast that event damaged.