You can go out for a hike and bring your GPS and then come back home and download your track onto your computer.   You can create an elevation plot, show your route, show your speed, and much more.    Here is a plot from a recent off-trail exploration:

In the top image, the blue line represents the route I took.   The flags show waypoints that I took along the route (I placed geocaches there).  

At the bottom, the red line shows the elevation over time.   The blue line shows speed.   

How do you do this?    The detailed description will be outlined in a separate post, but in a nutshell, here are the steps:

• Turn on your GPS at the start of the hike.   Enable tracking.
• Hike.
• At the end of the hike, either turn off Tracking or shut off your GPS.   Otherwise you will be tracking your trip home in the car.
• Once home, connect your GPS to the computer via USB
• Open Google Earth.
• Click Tools, then GPS.
• In the Import section, pick Tracks and click import.
• You should see your route projected onto the Google Earth view.  
• To get an elevation plot, you need to see the Sidebar.    Your track will be Saved in Temporary Places.   Right click there and pick Show Elevation Profile.
• You can save this view, save as a jpg, email the view, etc. from the same place!

This technology is new, but accessible to everyone.