And, as far as making beautiful maps, I highly recommend Caltopo. They have recently added a new map layer called "mapbuilder topo" that has shaded relief, trails drawn in nicely, and eliminates a lot of the clutter like wilderness boundaries and section lines usually found on standard USGS topo maps.

Here is an example of the Mountaineer's Route on Mount Whitney, and the normal walk up hiking trail. 1 to 24,000 scale, prints on a standard eight and half by 11 paper, and has a 1 km UTM grid. I made this in about 30 seconds for free and Cal topo. (I found the GPX tracks on line and import of them.)

If you would like to make maps like this, go to YouTube and search for "Caltopo" to see some excellent tutorial videos that will help get you started.

whitney.jpg