Yeah loft is no good. Especially when you have multiple hills.

You can sort of do it in Rhino:

It's tedious, but first you can build a "topo model" by extruding the contours, which must be closed curves. Stack these extruding chunks. Think actual cardboard model.

Then once that's built use the "drape" comand over the model. You'll get a pretty smooth surface. If the surface clings to the countour edges too much, try re-draping but play with the resolution settings (I think from 1 to 5 - arbitrary).

When you get a surface you like, you can trim it, shrink to fit, and rebuild it to suit your needs as the drape may be too "detailed" or sloppy on the edges.

To check its accuracy, use the contour command and compare your contours to the original. Good times.

in autocad, the EDGESURF command creates a mesh between four lines that are closed...

RULESURF creates a mesh between two lines...

SURFTAB1 command is to change the density of the wireframe in one axis...adjust according to your computers capability...maxing this out will make you computer work harder..

SURFTAB2 is to change the density of the mesh in the other direction...

Messy triangulations, but.... in Rhino, extract points from your topo curves, then use that pointcloud to generate a mesh from points (possibly a bonus tools only kind of deal?). If that ends up too triangulated for your tastes, drape it and you should end up with quads.

.mm

you can use the PATCH command to create a surface through your contours and then mesh that

there is also a free (better) version at http://www.reconstructivism.net/

look for: "Delaunay surfacing" under programming

Thanks. I have tried most of the above but not sure if they work well probably because the complexity of the contour lines. Sylvester, your link is very helpful and I would save it as record to try later. What I did in the end is using the Sandbox tool's contour command in google sketchup pro and export the info back to AutoCAD. It works!