DEM Extraction: How to?

[Brian Skahill]

Dear Grass Users,

I have been working with GRASS 4.1 installed on Red Hat Linux 4.1 on and
off for about 4-5 months now.  Thus far, I have been doing small controlled
experiments; creating datasets in a spreadsheet and then using the
r.in.ascii command to read the file into GRASS for display and modeling
purposes.  I would like to graduate and start working with 1:250,000-Scale
Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data which is provided online by the USGS. 
My initial attempts have not been successful.  My sources of information to
complete the task are a GRASS 4.0 Tutorial for DTED and DEM Elevation Data
Extraction published by USACERL in Dec. '91 and a script a friend of mine
gave me which he uses for converting a USGS DEM to a GRASS formatted file. 
The script is a "little of this, and a little of that" from the '91
tutorial.  Although the script does produce a file to display, it is not
the desired end product.  Therefore, does anyone have a suggestion as to
where to look for a step by step procedure for extracting 1:250,000-Scale
Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data provided by USGS into GRASS 4.1 (if such
a document exist!) ?


Brian Skahill
Phone:  (303) 556-4069
e-mail:  beskahil at ouray.cudenver.edu or BESkahill at aol.com
Personal Page:  http://members.aol.com/BESkahill/BrianSkahill.html