Background
David Goodman's book Best Backcountry Skiing in The Northeast outlines 50 of the most classic ski tours throughout New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, New York, and Massachusetts. My goal is to complete each of these tours as outlined in the 2nd edition of this guide.
The "Why"
My interest in this goal stems from a desire to explore more outside of my backyard, and have the opportunity to see (and ski) what the Northeast has to offer.
The Cause: Share Winter Foundation
Share Winter Foundation works to improve the lives, health, and fitness of youth through winter sports. It provides grants to organizations that run winter sports programs and pipelines to encourage ongoing participation, with an emphasis on creating a broader and more diverse winter sports community.
Personally, winter sports have been a building block for me to learn about myself, to be active, to travel, and to find happiness in the mountains. I chose Share Winter's Foundation as the non-profit tied to this goal because I want to give kids from all backgrounds the opportunity to fall in love with winter sports the way I did.
Technicalities
A "complete tour" is to do a route as outlined in the book. Small variances in routes are allowed due to safety concerns, though ideally, I would return to any route to fully complete it at another date when conditions may be more favorable. For some very remote areas this may not always prove feasible and some discretion may be necessary.
There are a few groupings of areas outlined in the guide that are counted "1 tour"- I plan to honor the same approach for achieving this objective by considering one of the tours in this group as "1 tour" in the final tally (ie. not have to do every single smaller tour in the grouping to count).
For tours that end in access to ski lines or gullies, the intent will be to also ski at least one of these lines. With that said, a ski tour to me represents the travel and access to these places, so only being able to complete the lines in partiality or at all due to conditions or safety concerns would not count against the tour from being completed.