She pays $96 a month to live in Yellowstone National Park

This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Millennial Money series, which details how people around the world earn, spend and save their money.

Zoe De La Paz shares a bedroom with a woman she met just a few months ago. She doesn’t have a car and hitchhikes when she needs a ride into town. She occasionally wakes up at 3 a.m. to the siren-like sound of an elk bugle, what she refers to as a “nightmare alarm clock.” She’s also living what she considers a dream life and working a job she truly loves.

De La Paz, 26, lives in Mammoth Village in Yellowstone National Park, where she works as a seamstress for the uniform department of Xanterra Parks & Resorts, a concessionaire that operates hotels, lodges, restaurants and other businesses in the national park. 

Until recently, De La Paz was splitting an apartment with a roommate in Chicago and earning about $75,000 a year as a mechanical designer for an engineering firm. But she was feeling creatively unfulfilled and was looking for a way out. In 2024 she thought she found one during a trip to visit a friend working at Yellowstone. De La Paz says witnessing the park’s natural beauty, plus the freedom her friend had through his seasonal job there, planted the seed for her to quit her 9-to-5 desk job and move there one day.

“It was what made me realize that life was too short and that I was very unhappy at my corporate job,” she tells CNBC Make It.

De La Paz, who began sewing as a teen cosplayer, brainstormed ways to get back into creative spaces. She took up odd jobs at Chicago-area music venues on nights and weekends; while catering a The Weeknd concert, she connected with the artist’s wardrobe team and was hired to do some costuming work for the tour’s backup dancers. From there, De La Paz knew she wanted to make the leap back into her creative passion and saw a possibility of making a full-time career out of it.

In early 2026, she began researching her options for a more hands-on, creative sewing gig and found one while checking for jobs at Yellowstone, as she’d done periodically since her trip. By June, she was headed to the national park for her next chapter.

She now spends her days behind a sewing machine, earning $19.25 an hour, and already has plans to take her sewing career to the next level.

“From a young age, I had been told that work must be work and play must be play, and that there isn’t necessarily a world that allows both to coexist with one another,” De La Paz says. “I never thought that my hobby could become my career.”