I moved to... The Alps

Francesca Eyre describes her new life in Morzine

I climbed Mont Blanc in June. You get to the top and feel incredibly small in a very big world. It’s incredibly humbling... and then I skied down the face. This is randonee skiing, an extreme type of skiing. I do a lot of racing, but it is also the original way people used to ski. They would put seal skins on the bottom of their skis, walk up a mountain, then ski down. We use acrylic skins now, and trek up a mountain off-piste, and ski down – in powder if you’re lucky!

I’ve lived in Morzine, in the French Alps, for 17 years now. I’m from West Sussex originally, and trained as a chef in Dublin when I was 19. I was based in Dublin and my mother sadly died and I had lost my sister, so I went back to London. In London I got an offer to go over to Morzine – so I headed off and then decided: yes!

The main thing that inspired me was the quality of life and the sports. I came over here as a chef and ended up being resort manager for a company. I’d done a ski season in Courchevel when I was quite young and had loved it, but said that I would never do another – the people were quite transient and fake. But Morzine people live here all year round rather than just for the winter, so it’s a real town and a working town. When I was settling in, there were less than 100 of us here so it was very easy to mix with the locals. As there weren’t so many tourists here, the English community were very much a team: if you needed any help somebody was always there. It’s different now - there’s so many more people here. When I was first here and we set up Chilly Powder, a ski lodge, there were only 5 chalet companies. Now, there’s 200-300.

We’ve been running Chilly Powder for about 15 years, and built the chalet hotel eight years ago. My husband’s a quantity surveyor and I’m a chef, so we built it from scratch after having independent chalets beforehand. It’s very much our family home, with photos and all of my furniture that I grew up with. Guests feel it’s a home from home. We all sit around the same table, and it’s like having a dinner party every night, they’re guests in our house – although sadly having to pay! On a typical day I go into the chalet between 7.30 and 8 – we live on site.

With the guests, I help plan their activities for the day, then sort out the animals – we’ve lots of chickens. During the day, it’s administration and checking the cleaners and doing their jobs, or I take the guests off trekking or canyoning. In the evening, the kids’ dinner is at 6.30, then I sit with the adults at 8pm. I get to bed about midnight. It’s a long day, but I wouldn’t do anything else. Sometimes, things go wrong, but we meet amazing people, and the kids just have a fantastic time. The sense of freedom is brilliant – they can go off playing in the woods, and we sometimes throw up a tent for them if they want to camp.

I normally do a lot of fell running in the summer. There’s some big races out here. Also, the trekking is amazing, and it’s all very safe here because it’s not as high as some of the resorts like Chamonix and Val d’Isere. So it’s great for beginner walkers who want to reach a peak, and then there are technical walks as well. We also do a lot of canyoning and mountain biking too. I’ve got three children now, so they’re doing a lot of the sports now that we used to do more of ourselves, pre-children! But just the other day I took my 11-year old son climbing on the Via Ferrata – metal bridges and paths that the Italians built during the wall to get across cliffs. That was fairly amazing! Does it ever feel a bit surreal? Well... the reality of work brings you back down!

To find out about staying, see www.chillypowder.com