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Use something like Delorme Street Atlas and you can look at it and tell what kind of road it is.

Yeah, my first step is generally to view one of the state-wide travel atlases (where one page might be 30 miles on a side, roughly). The next step is to get forest service maps from the applicable ranger district. Some people then go the even finer levels for topo maps and so forth.

With the Delorme, you can zoom in and zoom in until it will show you a road by the foot.

I am one mile off the county road. My farm road ends at my carport and the last 100 yards of it was never any kind of state or county road, yet when I fire up the satellite receiver, it puts that green dot right on my carport.

There is no question that it would show that a road is little more than a pig path in the high mountains. I have not used it in a long time and I am runnin on linux right now and because Delorme is a Windows app, I can't fire it up to double check, but I think you can also put the cursor on a given spot and read the elevation. It is almost as good as a topo anyway.