If you ever need topographic maps, or just need to look up topo information about someplace your going to visit, then you will love Topozone. What MapQuest did for driving directions, Topozone is doing for users of topo maps.
Sometimes (often if your not in a big city) it can be a royal pain to get topographic maps of a specific area–let alone be able to preview them and make sure they are recent. Topozone lets a user display a map online from any USGS(United States Geological Survey) map. They have the entire USGS collection of topological maps online–an interactive topo map of the entire United States! You can get a map area by place name, decimal degrees, deg(degree)–min(minute)–sec(second), or UTM(Universal Transverse Mercator) notation. You can zoom in and navigate around the map window just as in MapQuest. Really nice.
You can add topomaps to your own site with their extremely generous licensing program, e.g. up to 100 maps on one non-profit site, annotated or unaltered for the price of linking the map back to Topozone. They also offer fee based services such as creating custom topo maps for download such as a 10 x15 mile, 1:50,000 scale map centered on Mystic Pizza. You can also have any map you use online printed as up to a 36″ x 44″ waterproof map through their partnership with myTopo.com and or MapCard.
This is a sample that is the topo closeup of one of my favorite birding spots.
