Best way to make maps for my blog?

The only tool I have experience with is Topo! from National Geographic. You can put waypoints and other things on the map, trace your trail and then export an image.

Use Google Earth. You can turn on the terrain feature and tilt the view angle to get great bird's eye perspectives, and there's a tool for marking your route as a colored line. You can also import data from GPS, although I haven't done this myself. Images export with good resolution for screen, and okay for print. Google Maps has a lot of the same functions.

If you're hiking in US, you might also look at USGS website–good mapping tools there, including decent res scans of paper topos for the whole country. Unfortunately, the GeoPDF plug-in (which lets you play with layers on some of the topos) only works with Windows.

Best part: all of this is free. I think ArchGIS also has some free mapping tools online (just google it).

Note: google earth does not (for some unfathomable reason) come with the "terrain" feature available by default. A quick google search should turn up various "skins" you can download and apply to the program in order to get that function.

Hmm. I'm running version 5.2 on a Mac, and have never downloaded any plugins. I remember 3-d terrain used to enabled from the side bar menu. Now, it looks like you go to "preferences" (under Goggle Earth pulldown menu at top). Under "3D view" there a check-box for "show terrain" as well as a slider which lets you chose terrain quality and another box to specify vertical exaggeration.

Acme Mapper integrates Google maps with Topo maps. I use it quite a bit when looking for areas to hike.

http://mapper.acme.com/

Yeah, I've played around with that, and I can view it in 3-D view just fine, but that doesn't give me the topographic view with isolines that you get from the "terrain view" in web-based google maps, unless I'm missing something. Since that's my favorite view, plugins it is.