If something could move faster than light, Einstein’s relativity says that in some situations it could mean traveling or sending signals backward in time. Meanwhile, traveling near light speed makes time slow down for you, so you’re basically time-traveling into the future. The drive to Stryn doesn’t feel that fast. It takes forever, and when the capital’s in gridlock it feels like time’s running backward before you’ve even started the long haul.

7 snowboards, 4 bindings, 3 pairs of boots, three snowboarders from three generations. Full car. Everyone got the strict memo: one medium bag each, max. Note to self: buy a bigger car or start issuing instructions in Caps Lock. ONE MEDIUM BAG EACH! Bergen’s golden boy showed up with three bags and still managed to forget his best friend’s bindings — the friend who was riding the bus from Dombås. The best friend had no idea what was coming. His best friend always takes real good care of him.

We jump forward to Friday morning.

— Got the bindings? I need to mount before we drive up to the resort.

— Oops!

Names of the guilty have been kept, since they’re all guilty. Meet “Deigen” (“The Dough”), the guy you hear echoing through the resort even when you’re on a different lift, or you’ve trekked three hours into the backcountry and Deigen’s hiking the pipe. When you hear the jungle call of “SNOWBOARD!” — that’s Deigen, present and accounted for. Tourette’s? Diagnosis pending, says the chart. Storm, our youth alibi, is along for the ride. Slept in a hammock in the woods and murdered every feature on the mountain. Somebody’s gotta deliver the athletic acrobatics instead of just talking the day away. Turns out there’s more than one road to Rome, and a perfect day on the mountain comes in more than one flavor.

We jump a month and a half forward. A family of five rolls into Folven Camping. Exhausted, they’ve driven all day with whining kids in the backseat and a co-pilot who can’t tell up from down on Google Maps. Now it’s finally time to toss the heirs into bed, crack a beer, and soak in the mighty scenery around Hjelle. The family backs the car in, mom opens the cabin door, and the balloon pops. Not just a little — total collapse. WTF?!?! Dad’s never caught more grief in his life, the kids are screaming a three-part harmony, and the family’s back in the car hunting for somewhere else to sleep.

Back to the electric car working its way up from the south of Norway. After 7 hours in the car we roll into Folven Camping — no screaming kids in the backseat this time. Three of our friends have already checked in. As far as we know they don’t know each other, but the intel filtering into the car suggests they’ve got something in common and the vibe is good. Turns out Daniel and Øyvind have met before. Lake Tahoe, 1997. Now, 30 years later, they’re meeting again — at Norwegian snowboarding’s most legendary campground. We kick things off laughing, lying, and blasting Black Sabbath across the campsite until the tent walls are flapping from the old boombox. Nobody cares that the mattresses are the same ones we slept on in ‘97. Roof’s tight, walls aren’t too damp. TripAdvisor gets two reviews that night. One euphoric 6/6 with the comment “SNOWBOARD!” and one furious post from a family of five demanding the campground lose its license, slapped with a brutal 1-star.

Stryn? Who, what, where? A ski resort on a glacier in a country that should be uninhabitable, except the warm currents from the Gulf Stream turn ice into water the way Jesus turned water into wine. All set up so Jon Foster could capture Jamie Lynn on a roll of celluloid back in 1994. A 1/500th-of-a-second moment for Jon Foster, a giant leap for snowboard history.

The electric car crawls up county road 258. Can an EV crawl? Unclear. Up the old Strynefjell road, up toward water in its frozen form, tall snowbanks, and a snow consistency screaming for some deep structure in the base. Not quite as much snow as when Craig Kelly and Jeff Brushie visited the summer before — or right after — the Lillehammer Olympics. The top lift went to Valhalla years ago, but the old double chair is still standing. So no, the EV didn’t crawl after all — this Hyundai must be packing a Flux Capacitor. Up here, time stands still. Old proverbs cut both ways, but up here there’s only good.

Never been to a summer ski resort before? Wondering what it’s like? The snow’s soft and practically begging for reckless stunts. The conditions hand you a dose of confidence you haven’t felt since the cutest girl a grade above you glanced your way for 2-3 seconds back in middle school. Hormones went bananas. There’s jumps, rails, a mini pipe. But Stryn’s a magician in a top hat. Out of that hat comes a line down the mountainside: sidehit after sidehit after sidehit after sidehit, a right-hander, and then — you guessed it — more sidehits. Are you dead and arrived in snowboard heaven? But you don’t get lactic acid burn in your thighs in heaven, right? So this is real.

Jump after jump gets worked over by internationally known names — Terje Haakonsen, Ulrik Badertscher, Kristoffer Lerånd, and Øyvind Kirkhus. The carved walls launch riders into weightlessness. Sebastian Vik, Storm, Deigen, Kristian Skjømming, Emil Mo and more take off and land with the kind of precision SpaceX engineers analyze to pump their stock price. Then two more jumps and two rails as the encore to this magic show. Everyone who lands shouts “Da capo!” and swings right back into the lift line.

After spending some quality time in the ‘90s up on the glacier, our car — now known as the Delorean — carries us back down the hairpin switchbacks. Every turn is packed with tourists, jaws on the floor, snapping selfies, soaking in a Norwegian valley, knees going weak. We’re blasting the Simple Pleasures soundtrack and debating whether to take a dip in the river when we get down.

The campground’s fully booked. Tents, campers, sound systems, disposable grills, a crew playing some drinking game with half-liters in hand, a few people emerging from the shower, most too scared to enter a shower block that’s been unsupervised since 1998. And that’s when our Delorean konked out. We’re still stuck in the ‘90s. Even the fashion’s back. We FedEx the busted Flux Capacitor off for service, express.

Clock’s ticking toward midnight. More cars pull into the lot. We spot familiar faces behind sooty windshields. Emil Fossheim rolls his window down. Emil’s the one holding the reins on the wild beast known as Mushroom Crew, Norway’s gnarliest shaping crew. Ten guys have hand-built a banked slalom course over two straight nights. Payment for their labor: “Sorry boys. We rented out the cabins we promised you. You got tents?”

Forward in time again. Saturday night around the campfire. Maybe not a real fire — more a disposable grill on its last legs. Five tired, happy riders talking about the day, the awesome event, and the fact that Mushroom Crew “isn’t getting paid.” So what do you do when you’ve got a little buzz going and the endorphins are dancing around scorched, blackened hot dogs? You start a GoFundMe.

The Banked Slalom on Saturday is magic. Sick course, war paint on everyone’s faces (possibly fluorescent? Bright colors at least. Should’ve put that on the boards instead, maybe?), zero sign of FIS officials, and sun blazing from a clear sky. Note to self: remember to put sunscreen on your neck next year. And Morten — sunscreen the top of your head too. Two regular runs plus a switch run. Terje even sent it on a snowskate. Ulrik Badertscher took the win and got crowned. Terje landed ahead of Emil Mo in third. The awards ceremony in the sun, against the wall — about as cozy as a timed competition gets. Tons of prizes for the big, the small, the young, the old. Deigen was going for the win but blew it on the third-to-last turn of the switch run. Luckily it’s on film. Deigen’s thrilled about that.

Back down off the mountain. Nobody’s staying up there to work or suffer. Everyone heads down to camp, eats cold hot dogs that taste like lighter fluid because nobody can wait for the coals to turn white before grilling. Music thumping out of various sound systems. Only one cabin’s got a boombox and CD collection riding shotgun. We crack a beer, throw on Veronica Maggio and Down by Law. We talk turns, lap times, fluorescent wax, base structure, tapered vs. regular boards in slush. Sun goes down slow, and right along with it everyone’s self-assessed skill level climbs in proportion to the mead consumed — everyone’s convinced they would’ve won if it wasn’t for that bad luck in turn 5, or was it turn 7? Even though time’s stood still at Folven Camping, gotta say snowboard boots have come a long way. Dry liners the next day after a day in the slush. Wasn’t like that in 1997.

Sunday morning. I wake up early. Take a leak behind the cabin. It’s quiet. Sun’s already high. The last party stragglers shuffle toward a cabin and an old mattress. A few shuffle off into the woods, neck bent, where I assume a hammock’s waiting. I figure today’s lift line won’t be quite as long.

Checkout’s at 11. By 11:20 all the luggage is scattered across the grass. Then I remember the table was covered in empties when we crashed — and not just any empties. In Norway, almost every can and bottle carries a small deposit that you get back when you return it to a machine at the store, so people genuinely treat a pile of empties as cash lying around. So I wasn’t dreaming when I looked out the window and saw a guy with a cigarette in his mouth scooping up our deposit bottles in the middle of the night. He took the disposable grill too, so — thanks for that, I guess.

We’ve driven 7 hours to get here after all. We’re riding Sunday too. Less people, more tired legs. Five sidehits in a row before five more sidehits in a row make the legs scream for a break. Sorry, request denied. It’s a long wait until the snow falls again. You can see the line of sidehits from the lift. The entertainment’s solid. If FIFA sold lift tickets they’d run $500.

Riders coming through one after another — Terje, Ulrik, Lerånd, Knut Kristoffersen (god, the man can ride transitions), Kasper, Mo’ern, Skjømming, and so on. 3-4 meters between each rider, next one’s airborne before the last one’s landed. The entertainment value alone is sending the resort’s stock through the roof. Damn, should’ve taken that ownership stake offer.

The parking lot. Tired men and women. But there’s smiling. Thanks all around for an epic weekend. Boots aren’t allowed in the car — gotta go in the ski box. Hugs, the occasional “ouch,” sunburned faces, ears, noses. I wonder if the volume’s going to sit at 100% the whole drive home, and whether it’s Unbroken and Integrity on rotation. Things get quieter. Even Deigen manages up to 30 seconds of silence at a stretch. Storm’s on DJ duty. Moroccan blues playing. We come out of a tunnel. What happened? A modern society. The Flux Capacitor’s working again. Hey there, 2026. We’re back in the future. Next year, a new time jump. Hoping Folven skips the renovations again this season too.