Best in the Deepest Snow

Black Crows Nocta - Review 2025

By: Derek Doyle & Annie Gunton - Updated: April 2025

About this guide

We gave our Gear Lovers one job:
Find the best and most popular products and review them.

Our review team always considers durability, price, quality, and value in their reviews.

Our review team:

Derek Doyle

Contributor at SlopeMagazine.com

Hailing from Aspen, Colorado, Derek began his skiing career in the illustrious Powder Pandas ski school program, eventually sort of growing up to ski professionally in slopestyle and big air, while moonlighting as a ski tuner and writer.

Now living in Colorado’s front range, Derek can be found among the i70 crowd racing to find hidden powder stashes on the back bowls of Vail, on Park Lane in Breckenridge, under the lights on Keystone, and returning home to the High Alpine steeps in Snowmass. When he's not skiing he’s wishing he was, or nerding out on mountain biking, climbing, and golf.

Annie Gunton

Editor at SlopeMagazine.com

Annie has lived on 4 continents and traveled through 6. Spending her time in places as different as London and the Kalahari she has adapted how she gets out and enjoys what’s around.

Disclosure: We are reader supported, and earn affiliate commissions If you find a good deal on Slope Magazine, you click to the retailer, and you buy the product, we get a commission of the sale. That's how we pay ourselves. It does not make the product pricier for you. when you buy through us.

Where to buy Black Crows Nocta:

REI

Backcountry

Evo

Previous iterations of the Black Crows Nocta went full send on making a powder ski that was a bit of a one-trick pony, fully rockered and built to float but lacking aptitude in any other category. The new 2024 Nocta has answered the call for versatility and then some.

Softer, asymmetrical, and with added camber, the Nocta oozes stability, and adds a bit of pop, while keeping its deep snow expertise and unique tip and tail caps for the 2024 season. With a hearty 122mm waist and a 19m turn radius, this ski lives to eat up fresh snow in the trees and bounce off natural features in powder fields.

This year’s Noctra is also lighter and easier to maneuver by opting out of the reverse camber and opting in on a progressive rocker profile and flex in the tip and tail. The added flexibility gives these skis a quick twitch, fine-tuned feel, a noticeable difference from the burley stiff feel from past Noctas.

While these are overly capable on the deepest days, they also perform exceptionally well in soft choppy snow if you’re a few days late to a storm or prefer to explore the entire mountain. That said, not all of us are lucky enough to have to dig our cars out of the snow to go skiing all the time. But if you need a ski with powder day finesse and stability on tough descents, these are all-around big mountain slayers.