On the basis for the comment on blaze patterns:

I learned about the trails and ways markings from an older friend who had started cruising around the area in the early 1950's. What his source was I do not know, but everything I have seen corroborates what he said, and I have done more bushwhacking than he. He did not know if the blazing patterns were USFS wide, but he did know it was the Region Ten standard.

Steve

One thing to keep in mind if you want to get into this kind of thing, is that the wetter rainforest areas will overgrow trails faster, and the bushwhacking is thicker. If you go a bit farther east into drier areas, older trails are more visible. It seems to me that the Mt Hood NF is probably a harder than average place to do this kind of thing.

Mt Adams has a wealth of old trails. Some are abandoned and rerouted sections of the PCT. The older forest service travel map for the area has many trails that are not on the newer topo maps of the wilderness.

I have a backlog of "lost" trails that I want to explore there. Some are trails I saw while on a trip, and made a note of. In once case, I met an older hunter who told me about a trail that is long gone. He told me where it started and said to find blazes on the trees - a direct route to Looking Glass Lake that doesn't require going up to the Round the Mtn Trail first.