As principal cellist for the Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra, Mark Votapek delighted audiences this concert season with solos in Astor Piazzolla’s “Four Seasons” and Respighi’s “Pines of Rome,” as well as other works where his talent shines on his 300-year-old Italian-made cello.

But the Blaisdell Concert Hall, like similar venues in Portland, Ore., and St. Louis, isn’t the grandest place he’s played. That’s reserved for the Pacific Crest Trail, where Votapek’s love of hiking and music converged during outdoor performances.

When Votapek puts down his bow, his focus often turns to hiking, in Hawaii as well as on the mainland. The Pacific Crest Trail, which takes hikers along the Sierra Nevada and Cascades from Mexico, through California, Oregon and Washington to Canada, has been his greatest muse. He’s done the five-month hike twice, in 2008 and 2013, when he performed for fellow hikers.

“The first time I did it, I liked it well enough to want to do it a second time but to combine it as a concert tour,” said the 47-year-old Michigan native. “I played 27 concerts in 2,700 miles.”

His concerts on the trail found him in a variety of places: a biker bar, taverns, community centers, parks and private homes.

“They weren’t the most polished, perfect concerts,” Votapek said laughing. “It was some difficult repertoire and some difficult circumstances, sometimes playing outdoors in 50 degrees, sometimes 90 degrees, almost entirely in front of audiences that hadn’t heard cello music before.”

The reaction was positive.

“There were people who would come to concerts and hear where the next concert was, 50 miles up, and they’d go up to the next concert,” he said.

The tour itself was an exercise in logistics. Votapek’s cello — not the vintage one, but a replica — was driven to stops along the route, and he would practice for a day before each performance. Having hiked the trail before, Votapek knew how to schedule the journey.

Votapek hiked the Pacific Crest Trail mostly out of a love of being outdoors but also in appreciation of some of the simpler things in life.

“Life is so complicated, the way we make it,” he said. “We construct all this wonderful, complicated stuff, like a symphony concert … but you get out there and really live as a backpacker for a long period of time — not a one-week vacation, but a long period of time — and all that complication sort of disappears. Life becomes about the people you meet, where are you going to sleep, where’s the next water, and there’s something that just feels natural.”

Votapek first won the position of principal cellist with the defunct Honolulu Symphony Orchestra in 2004, left for a few years when that symphony went bankrupt, then won the position last year with the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra. He and his wife, Emma, a violinist for the symphony, divide their time between Hawaii and the San Francisco Bay Area, where they also perform.

Votapek first embraced long-distance trips while living on the mainland, where he worked in Portland, Ore., and then St. Louis. During his years here in Hawaii, he’s hiked all over Oahu.

He and his wife scaled Granite Peak in Montana, which was “scary as all get-out,” said Votapek, who does not consider himself an accomplished climber. “It snowed a couple of days before, so we had a lot of moves on wet rock.”

Votapek also has played cello while rafting down the Colorado River. Organizers of the Moab Music Festival provided him with a carbon-fiber cello that was impervious to water. “It was always going out of tune,” he said. “Usually the performances were in camp, but they did want me to play sometimes while floating — on flat water, not on rapids.”

But even when he doesn’t have a cello with him in the great outdoors, there’s “almost always music going on in my head,” he said.

“I get ‘earworms’ and sometimes they’re very annoying. I think I hiked for two weeks with ‘That’s Amore’ in my head, just constantly. I’ve had times when I’ve gone through in my head an entire Mahler symphony, every measure, from beginning to end. But then other times it’s ‘Happy Birthday’ that gets stuck in my head.”