I found a couple YouTube vid's on finding grid distance and elevation using topos maps. I haven't watched them all in full yet. but what I saw they are worth checking out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYLxZ_F7DEw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKts3nApuZI

Here is a link to a site called Map Tools and has quite a bit of information on UTM.

http://www.maptools.com/UsingUTM/index.html