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.