One phone call was all it took for Hanna Beatty to pack up her life and start over.
She was halfway through her shift as an assistant for a small escrow firm in Redding, California, when a customer called her to loudly complain about the firm’s services.
“This person was just not very happy and decided to take it out on me,” Beatty, 24, recalls. “As soon as I got off the phone I had this moment of clarity, like, ‘I deserve more than this. I’m so young, and I’m so burned out.’”
Beatty didn’t quit her job that day, but she did tell her boss that the next time they were doing layoffs, or needed to cut someone from the staff to save money, they should get rid of her position first. A week later, Beatty says, she was let go.
Instead of despairing over the loss of her job, Beatty viewed it as a chance to realize a childhood dream of living and working in the wilderness.
She spent the winter working at Heavenly Ski Resort in Lake Tahoe before moving to Yosemite National Park in March, where she currently lives and works as a seasonal employee with her boyfriend, Justin Olsen.
Quitting the 9-to-5 grind for ‘something simpler’
Beatty started looking for seasonal jobs in October 2022 on Vail Resorts’ careers website at the recommendation of a friend.
She had applied to a couple of seasonal jobs at ski resorts throughout the U.S. but focused her search on California, as she wanted to be close to Redding, her hometown, just in case things didn’t work out.
“If you’re like me and you’ve spent your whole life in the same spot, it can be intimidating to leave everything you know behind,” Beatty says.
She knew she likely would be taking a pay cut — her job at the escrow firm paid about $5,000 per month — but Beatty said she craved “something simpler” than working 50-plus hours each week.
In November, Beatty received an offer from Heavenly Ski Resort to be a restaurant lead at one of their lodges, a full-time job that would start in December, close to when her apartment…
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