Last updated: October 2026
The first part of this story ends with a sprained ankle, Tuesdays at O'Shucks and Portuguese that was better than my English. This is the second part: what happened with the money, what happened with the work, and the day the mountain closed in the middle of a shift.
My first paycheck arrived at the end of December 2019. With the second one, in the first days of January, I paid my uncle Sergio back for the flights he had lent me on his card. The plan was three instalments; I paid it in one. And with my first full January paycheck I went out and bought a MacBook Pro. Told today it sounds like a whim. At the time it was the first time in my life I could buy something like that with my own money.
Here is the figure nobody gives you before you sign. In Utah the minimum wage is the federal one: $7.25 an hour, frozen since 2009. I was paid 10 as a restaurant attendant and 11 as a cook. It was legal, and it was little. To put it in perspective: I now live in California, where the 2026 minimum is $16.90 and rises every January; next door in Nevada it is $12. In Park City in 2020, ten dollars an hour meant being paid the same as a banquet server, and the banquet server's deal worked because on top of that they got the banquet tips, which were very good. In the restaurant and the kitchen, I did not.
I made up for it with hours. I had two jobs at Deer Valley: mornings in the restaurant and evenings in the kitchen of the seafood buffet at Snow Park Lodge, the building at the base of the mountain. Between the two I went down to the staff area, opened my locker, changed uniforms and went back up. Four days a week I worked doubles; the other two or three, singles. There were seven-day weeks. And on ten dollars an hour, working like that, I paid for the laptop, the Bryce and Antelope road trip, brand-name clothes at the outlets, a gimbal to film with my phone and an iPhone 11. I had never had that kind of buying power. The lesson is not that ten dollars is enough: it is that a season pays you for the hours you put in, and the hours run out.
My contract ran until 31 March 2020. With Paula, Selva and one more friend we planned the farewell trip in a Word document. Paula dreamed of Seattle, so she would fly to Seattle and on to Chicago. The three of us would take the California Zephyr, the Amtrak train that crosses the country and stops in Salt Lake City, all the way to Chicago: two days on a train, for the experience. In Chicago we would meet, rent a car, drive down through Washington and Philadelphia and finish in New York, which Selva and our friend had never seen. We still had to decide whether to return the car on arrival or keep it a day longer for Boston and back. That was late February. None of the four of us had settled on a flight home to Argentina yet.
The first confirmed case of coronavirus in the United States had been in January, in the Seattle area. In March it stopped being news from Asia. Every day there were more cases, and the information going around was brutal: no cure, no vaccine, you catch it breathing near someone or touching what they touched. From Argentina people flooded me with questions on social media. And in town the reasoning was simple and terrifying: if it is already in Seattle, with hundreds of flights a day between Asia, Europe and every city in the United States, it is already everywhere.
A few days before the closure, a kitchen colleague, Federico, put on his uniform, clocked in, and heard that an employee at a bar in town was a confirmed case. He took the uniform off, went home, packed, took an Uber to Salt Lake City airport and flew to Argentina that same day. That was the level of panic. The girls and I had long talks, and some of us cried: you do not want to die in a Utah town far from your family, but you do not want to go home infected and kill your parents either. Both thoughts ran through your head at once.
On Saturday the 14th Utah confirmed its first case of community spread, and it was in Summit County, our county. On Sunday the 15th I went to work anyway. You could feel the tension in the restaurant: guests were cancelling and heading back to their cities, giving up skiing to shut themselves in at home, and managers were walking in and out of meetings. I finished the morning shift, went down, changed, went up to the kitchen and we started setting up the buffet like any other night. In those last days we no longer let guests serve themselves: we served them.
The chef put down what he was doing and went to the directors' meeting. When he came back down he told us right there, in the kitchen, with the burners on: we are closed. The restaurant, the resort, everything. That was our last day of work. Gather your things, clock out and go home. Deer Valley suspended operations that Sunday, 15 March, along with every resort in its group, and Park City Mountain did the same. Two weeks before my contract ended, the season was over in one sentence.
Keep reading: the odyssey home →
The stories run in order: this is what happened around this one.
