click on the tack,, you can enter the lat and lon. and name the waypoints,, if you explore you can change the markers to seperate waypoints, certain one for camps, or wallows, or whatever you have on the gps.
not all areas are aeiral photos yet,, give it time, and also keep updateing the google earth,, took about 4 months from the time they launched it to get aeiral photos in my area, actually it split a mountain in the area i hunt half was colored map, and half was aeiral photo,, kind of drove me nuts.
also on the left side of the main screen you can click different things to show up on the map, water roads parks all different kinds of things.

After I posted my response, I went back into Google Earth and tried to bring up a couple locations I've looked at before. All I see tonight is bright green in the window pane where the map should be. It seems I've run into this before and found a way to display the zoomable map fine, but not today.

Any idea of what setting or other thing I'm doing wrong?

if you have the updated ver. move your cursor into the top right corner, the controls dissappear when your cursor isn't there. and you might want to update if you can, if its bright green, it might have zoomed in to close.

I tried as you said and zoomed in and out. The tool bar is on the bottom locked in place. I've tried several thousand feet altitude, 5000 ft. 10000 ft. etc., etc. It's still bright green. I did down load the latest free version about 2 weeks back thinking that might be it. Still no go. It could be that the latest needs a newer graphic card my PC doesn't have. I can get by with MS Virtual Earth and my map source Topo map software for general research and downloading to my GPS.
It ultimately comes down to doing the research possible beforehand then putting boots on the ground in the most likely areas where there is sign of game and start hiking and glassing to find them..

I figured out why I was seeing only "green" in the map perspective of Google Earth. I went to their help troubleshooting and saw something similar for Macs needing to enable accepting "cookies" from this Google Earth site. I had upgraded to IE 7 in the past month and suppose that it reset my security settings and sites that I accept cookies from. So, I added that site in IE options > security and also in my PC's security software to accept cookies from that site. It now works for me. Thanks for the suggestions.

I've been using this one for a few years now...not the best, but free.
You can switch back and forth from typo to aerial.

www.terraserver-usa.com