Detailed review of the Rome Ravine Pro snowboard 2024-2025, a bulldozer of a board, with a wide, shovel-esque nose tapering a little to a formidable tail.
Why We Chose The Rome Ravine Pro: One of our favourite all-mountain boards of the last five years, souped up.
The Rome Ravine Select is now the Rome Ravine Pro. As both names suggest, this is a little-bit-special version of one of Rome’s best-loved chargers – only now it fits neatly into the brand’s uber-responsive line, alongside the Artifact Pro and the Agent Pro.
“It’s a bulldozer of a board, with a wide, shovel-esque nose tapering a little to a formidable tail”
Otherwise not much has changed, and that’s no bad thing, as anyone who has ridden the original Ravine will attest.
If you’re more interested in digging trenches than spinning to win, then the Ravine should have always been on your radar. For the ‘Pro’ version, with its additional stiffness, that’s even truer.
Considering its shape, the original is surprisingly good at getting the creative juices flowing – so if you step to the Pro version, you’ll be sacrificing some of that. However, what you lose in versatility and freestyle fun, you gain in sheer nerve-holding, boundary-pushing stability.
The shape of the Rome Ravine Pro is the first thing you’ll notice about it, even before you’ve made a turn. It’s a bulldozer of a board, with a wide, shovel-esque nose tapering a little to a formidable tail. As if to underline the point in permanent marker, a more standard silhouette has been incorporated into the graphic – essentially the opposite of Bullseye’s ‘let’s have a look at what you could have won!’ moment.
“You barely need to engage your brain to keep this one afloat, giving you more headspace to seek out the most slashable stashes”
Buy the Rome Ravine Pro Snowboard 2024-2025: $559 at backcountry.com
The camber in the profile is set back, complementing the taper nicely in the powder. You barely need to engage your brain to keep this one afloat, giving you more headspace to plot your route and seek out the most slashable stashes. Oh, and that’s before you factor in the 3D shaping in the nose, which lifts the edges slightly at each side to give you even more float.
The waist width and sidecut are fairly run-of-the-mill, in a good way; there’s no volume shifting going on here. When you want to just blast around the piste, the Ravine Pro offers up a traditional carving experience complete with nimble edge changes.
It’s only when you look under the bonnet that the differences between the standard Ravine and the Pro version are revealed, so be sure to check both recipes to determine which is right for you.
The core is the first point of diversion; the half-paulownia, half-poplar split in the original has been changed to a two-to-one ratio in the Pro. That means it’s even lighter, without being any less strong or responsive. Then there’s the flax-based upgrades, which add extra dampening and durability. Plates made of this versatile natural fibre sit under each foot to reduce the chance of binding blowouts, and there’s more between the core and the sidewall to reduce chatter at high speeds.
“It’s lighter without being any less strong or responsive”
The angled carbon rods in the non-Pro version are present here too, but this time they’re wrapped in an additional layer of carbon for even more pop and response. The fact that they’re placed only in the tail means you get a little more play in the rest of the board.
For boxers, turning pro may be the start of a journey that leads to lucrative paydays, invites to Riyadh and, eventually, sideshow rucks with abrasive YouTubers. For the Ravine, it means taking the best bits of a modern classic and tweaking them for the more demanding rider out there.
The result is something that won’t be for everyone, but is bound to be embraced by those it was designed to serve – and with a size range to catch all comers, we bet there’ll be more folks on the Ravine Pro this year than cells dislodged from Tyson Fury’s brain.
Buy the Rome Ravine Pro Snowboard 2024-2025: $559 at backcountry.com
Pros:
Cons:
“This is a beautiful looking board with a big scooped nose, a medium sidecut and 26cm waist with a short but stiff tail that helps make this board feel very precise and agile, despite the 7.5mm taper. Lay it down on piste and the hold is immense, it wants to drive off the rail and for a board with a decent waist width it was still very nimble. It was very stable at speed, I got it up to around 55mph/85kmh and it didn’t even flinch, and offered a super stable platform on landings. The one weakness was switch – if you want to ride switch a lot there are better options, but if you want a board that will charge any type of natural terrain and dig trenches on piste then the Ravine Pro could be the board for you.”
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