What makes us different?

There are no leaves in our logo. The days of recycling being a “green” badge of honor, and proximity to a forest defining an “ecolodge” are over. We want to change the perception that sustainability begins and ends with reusing your towel and turning off your light. Sustainability means installing moorings instead of dropping anchors on your favorite reef break, or leaving an old-growth forest intact instead of clear-cutting it for a new mogul field. Sustainability means supporting like-minded businesses in supply chains and incorporating nuances of local culture rather than creating homogenous cookie-cutter experiences.

STOKE’s co-founders are personally dedicated to a sustainable future and are avid, passionate, surfers and snowboarders. STOKE standards encompass and celebrate community, culture, environment, heritage, experience, economy, safety, and quality. STOKE Certified surf and mountain destinations and events leverage these components to get visitors stoked on sustainability and keep them coming back for generations to come. That is what STOKE represents. Sustainability is STOKE!

TheProblem

We love to ride. We do it every day. Our favorite places to ride and our connections to these areas are threatened by climate change, physical destruction from poorly planned development, and negative impacts on local society, culture, and heritage. The reality is that if we don’t act now, within a generation—opportunities to ride in amazing places will not exist as we know them today.

TheSolution

Go beyond offsetting your impact. Operators care what riders think. Riders care how operators treat the places and people they love to visit. Both riders and operators have the power to make change. With STOKE, operators have a clear and structured path to best practice, and riders can easily identify and choose operators who embody sustainability. Will you join the growing community of people demanding a sustainable culture and choose STOKE?

Our Vision

By creating demand for sustainability from within the riding community, STOKE will catalyze and enable operators to implement innovative sustainable practices so our culture will continue to thrive and overcome the environmental, socio-cultural, and economic challenges of the future.

The Story

Part 1: Pioneering A New Industry

Dr. Jess Ponting is a lifelong surfer, the leading academic in sustainable surf tourism research, and founder and Director of the world’s first Center for Surf Research. Jess initially identified that despite the fact that we ride in the world’s most fragile environments, there is not enough research identifying the impacts of surf tourism. He sought to identify sustainability best practices in surf tourism and to provide tools for surf tourism operators to implement these initiatives.

Part 2: Laying The Groundwork

After seeking the endless winter and returning from a semester snowboarding and studying Adventure Tourism Management in New Zealand, Carl Kish interned for the Center for Surf Research as a college senior in the Sustainable Recreation and Tourism Management program at San Diego State University. Focused on studying sustainable surf tourism, Carl developed his research while visiting resorts in Fiji and Costa Rica, which is where he saw the need for a formalized standard for surf tourism operators. While Carl gets stoked on surfing, his heart lies in the mountains. After graduating, in addition to moving into sustainable tourism consulting full-time, he took the building blocks of his sustainable surf tourism research and began studying best practices in sustainable ski tourism. One year later, STOKE was born.

Our Staff is Seriously STOKED. Meet our team.