Hiding all contours except multiple basins in Civil 3D 2010

We love how contours in Civil 3D give us instant design feedback. During design, we set our design surface (FG) style to show 0.2' Contours. That together with spot elevation and slope surface labels reveals immediately any flat or steep bloopers in our designs.

But when it comes time to show our design on our plans, we sometimes don't want contours everywhere. Here's what we do to limit contours to multiple selected areas of our site. I'll talk about showing contours for retention basins.

1. For each retention basin, we create a new surface named Contours Basin A, Contours Basin B, etc.

2. We Paste into each surface from our FG surface.

3. We create an Outside mask under Surface, Definition for each of the basins to hide everything but that basin.

4. We change surface FG to No_Display

5. We add contour labels for the basins.

6. We add a User Contour for each basin to represent the High Water line. This is under Surface Properties, Analysis tab, User Contours drop-down.

7. We set the User Contour Label Style for each surface to High Water (our in-house style that says "HW=").