WALKING HOME

A JOURNEY ALONG THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL

By Jonathan Hite | Founder & Creative Director, HAUS of HITE

There are moments in life when standing still becomes its own kind of surrender. In the spring of 2024, I realized I had been standing still for far too long.

Graduate school applications sat unopened on my desk, heavy with expectations that no longer belonged to me. The road ahead — polished, prestigious — felt suffocating rather than liberating. What I craved wasn’t more structure or validation. I craved something older, something elemental. Something the world could not confer and no institution could teach.

Without fully realizing it, I had already begun to answer the call. Every day for years, I had honored a small, sacred ritual: walking. An hour in the hills, a trail by the coast, a meandering path through the city streets. It wasn’t exercise. It was prayer. It was reflection. It was, quietly, the foundation of my becoming.

Reading Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust confirmed what my soul already knew: walking is a sacred act. A form of knowing. A way of moving forward not just through the world, but through one’s own becoming.

And so I decided: I would walk my home state.I would begin at the Mexican border and make my way north along the Pacific Crest Trail — one of the longest, wildest paths on earth. I would walk not for accolades, not for anyone else’s approval, but because my life demanded it.

I secured a late-season permit — May 24, 2024. I purchased my first real backpack, an Osprey that would become an extension of my spine. A Big Agnes Copper Spur tent to become my home. Bright yellow trail runners that would wear thin before a hundred miles had passed. Everything felt new, yet ancient, like I was stepping not into an adventure, but into a remembering.

I left behind the polished world of plans and entered the sacred uncertainty of the trail.

Left to Right: Federica, Wei & I waiting for our ride into Wrightwood.

Setting Out

The desert greeted me first: a world of thorns and sun and open sky.The first days were a collision of nerves and wonder. The weight of the pack, the relentless thirst, the unfamiliar sound of my own breath against the endless silence.

Yet within those first days, I found companions: Dana and Dave, two Eagle Scout Masters whose steady, easy humor anchored my uncertainty. Robert, an art professor from Texas, whose quiet wisdom reminded me that creativity survives even in barren places. Wei from Taiwan, who would become my hiking partner and steady presence through hundreds of miles.

Others would weave into our orbit — Federica from Italy, Antoine from France, Max known as "Cactus" — and for a time, we were a tribe. Bound not by past histories, but by blistered feet, laughter over powdered meals, and the invisible thread of shared purpose.

Trail families are ephemeral by nature — and sacred precisely because they are temporary. You never know how long you will walk together. Only that for now, you are not alone.

Cactus & I at Mile 600

Baptisms by Fire and Water

It was on the long, punishing climb out of Tehachapi that I first understood the real cost of the trail.

The desert unfurled endlessly beneath a sun so fierce it felt almost mythological, pressing down with a weight that no preparation could outwit. The air shimmered. The rocks radiated heat. The very ground seemed to hum with an invisible warning.

I carried seven liters of water that day—heavy, essential, and barely enough. Sixteen miles stretched ahead of me like a dare. Every step forward demanded surrender: to the heat, to the weight, to the simple fact that the trail would always be larger than my ambition.

Somewhere along that burning stretch, my body rebelled. The edges of the world blurred. My knees buckled. I collapsed face-first into a shallow creek—saved only by the presence of Max, trail name "Cactus," whose quiet companionship that day became something closer to grace.

It was not a grand, cinematic failure. It was a baptism. A stripping away of the idea that I could will myself through anything, untouched by the forces around me.

In that moment, soaked and shaking and utterly humbled, I began to understand that the trail wasn’t something to be conquered. It was something to be in conversation with—something to learn from. And I, finally, was ready to listen.

Camping at Rae Lakes in King's Canyon.

The World in Bloom

As the desert gave way to the high Sierra, the world changed not with a shout, but with a sigh of green and water and stone.

At Rae Lakes, the mountains held their breath. The water was so clear it seemed like a trick of the light, reflecting the sky with such precision that standing at its shore felt like teetering between earth and heaven.

Mornings were slow there, deliberately so.Wei and I would sit side by side on cold granite slabs, cradling battered mugs of instant coffee, speaking little. Some places demand silence, and this was one of them.

It wasn't grandeur that moved me most. It was the smallness I felt, and the deep sense that I was exactly where I needed to be — not despite my insignificance, but because of it.

The trail didn't celebrate strength. It celebrated presence.And slowly, it taught me to do the same.

Rae Lakes in Kings Canyon

Walking with Ghosts

Higher still, the John Muir Trail braided itself into our path, and with it, a different kind of sacredness settled over the miles.

John Muir, whose name had become almost mythic in the language of wilderness, had walked these same valleys, these same ridges. Yet the landscape did not memorialize him in statues or plaques. It remembered him the way it remembers all who listen carefully: with a soft echo of wonder.

At the summit of Muir Pass, the stone hut built in his honor rose from the rock like an offering. It was small, unassuming, a perfect circle of stone designed to shelter wanderers from the worst storms the mountains could summon.

Inside its cool walls, Wei and I leaned our backs against the stone and let the silence fill us. There was nothing to say. The journey had already said everything that needed saying.

The ghosts we walked with were not heavy.They were invitations — to walk more slowly, to see more deeply, to remember that the truest monuments we leave behind are not built of stone, but of reverence.

Wei & I at Muir Hut

The Bonds We Carry

Beyond the grandeur of the mountains and the hush of the valleys, it was the human connection that threaded the experience together with unexpected tenderness.

Our trail family, assembled by chance and sustained by quiet loyalty, became a refuge more enduring than any tent or waystation. Dana and Dave, Federica and Antoine, Robert, Wei, Cactus. Each carried their own reasons for walking—some spoken, many not—and yet we became witnesses to one another’s unfolding.

The trail stripped us down to something elemental: not the titles we held or the lives we left behind, but the bare, honest pulse of being human.We shared water, laughter, blisters, fears.We shared the sacred permission to simply exist, unadorned, together.

When departures came, as they inevitably do—knees giving out, jobs calling home, hearts choosing different roads—there was no fanfare, only the soft gravity of gratitude. To walk alongside someone, even briefly, is a covenant. You carry a piece of their story with you, and they carry yours.

And in that exchange, you realize: the beauty of connection is not measured by its length, but by its depth.

Wanda Lake

The Long Becoming

Transformation, I learned, does not arrive in thunderclaps. It happens slowly, almost imperceptibly, the way a river smooths stone.

Each morning I unzipped my tent and stepped into the rawness of another day. Each evening I laid down, lighter by some burden I hadn’t known I was carrying.

No single summit or milestone defined the change. Instead, it was the quiet accumulation of choices: To keep walking when it hurt. To stay open when it would be easier to close. To trust that even when I could not see the way forward, my feet would know the path.

The trail did not forge a new self. It revealed the one I had been all along—the self that knew, deep down, that no one else could or should chart my course for me.

The trail taught me that responsibility for my life—and the wonder of it—rests within me. It always had.

Latopie Lake

Arriving Without Ending

Crossing into Ashland, Oregon on October 26th was not the grand finale some might imagine. There were no trumpets, no dramatic endings.

There was only the soft realization that every small, deliberate step had mattered. That the dream had been built one decision, one breath, one blister at a time.

I felt a profound sense of accomplishment—not for having conquered the trail, but for having honored it. Honored the journey. Honored myself.

The beauty had not been waiting at the border. It had traveled with me all along, hidden in the rhythm of footsteps, the kindness of strangers, the quiet triumph of getting up and walking again each morning.

Finishing the trail was never the point. Becoming was.

Last Campsite on Trail. Sunset over Shasta.

Creating the Beauty We Wish to See

Coming home, the world looked deceptively the same. But I had changed—and with me, the way I saw, the way I created, the way I lived.

The Pacific Crest Trail taught me that home is not a structure you enter. Home is a space you carry within you—a sanctuary you cultivate through intention, reverence, and love.

This understanding has since become the beating heart of HAUS of HITE.

Design, to me, is no longer about building spaces that impress. It is about creating temples—places where people can retreat, reflect, and honor the life they are living, wherever they are on their journey.

It is about crafting sanctuaries that evolve alongside the people within them. Just as the trail shaped me with stone and wind and stars, I now shape spaces with an eye toward meaning, memory, and the slow unfolding of beauty.

At HAUS of HITE, every home, every project, every collaboration is an invitation: To walk more deeply into oneself. To create with heart. To live with intention.

Walking Still

The trail did not end at the Oregon border.

It continues in the way I pause to notice the angle of late afternoon light through a window. It echoes in the way I trust the natural unfolding of a creative idea. It lives in the friendships I cherish, the spaces I craft, the life I now inhabit fully.

I am still walking. Not away from anything—but ever deeper into the life I am building, step by conscious step.

I am walking home. I am creating the beauty I wish to see in the world.

This is HAUS of HITE.