Let’s be real: 2024 is off to a shaky start. A few days in, a door plug blew off a plane minutes after it ascended from PDX. Then an ice storm immobilized the Pacific Northwest for a week. Then someone in Central Oregon caught the bubonic plague from their cat.

What’s a weary, joy-starved soul to do? Here’s a thought: go fling yourself down the snowy slopes of Mount Hood on an inflatable wheel of rubber as the weirdly lusty tones of Harry Styles’s “Watermelon Sugar” pulse through the crisp alpine air and neon lights flash violet and bubblegum all around you.

This is Cosmic Tubing (trademarked, hence the capitalization), a wonderfully shameless riff on Cosmic Bowling (also trademarked, apparently) that happens three nights a week up at Skibowl, the resort best known for its steep runs—it has Oregon’s biggest collection of black diamonds—and relatively cheap lift tickets. It’s known, too, for its night skiing, with 36 runs that glide till 10pm. But that’s not the only after-dark activity on offer.

Four friends and I shuttled up the mountain to see what the fuss was about. (At $39 per person, the experience is $2 more than day tubing.) Outside the wood-shingled Multorpor Lodge, which houses a stout stone fireplace, historic photos, and a long tap list, we fashioned glow stick crowns before retrieving our tubes from teetering piles. Then we stood in a snaking line, as if waiting to board a roller coaster, which eventually inched forward to deposit us onto a conveyor belt that chugged us uphill.

Atop the slope, we found more lines, each leading to one of 15 parallel tubing lanes, comfortingly separated by berms to prevent collisions. Fifteen is a respectable count, placing Skibowl ahead of several other tubing hills across the country with their own takes on Cosmic Tubing. (Though Skibowl holds the federal trademark—and does seem to be an OG, having debuted its laser lights and sound system in 2012—plenty of other resorts have hopped on the trend, including Ohio’s Snow Trails and Idaho’s Magic Mountain, each of which has seven lanes, and Colorado’s Winter Park, which has only four. No one, however, can match Camelback Resort in New York’s Poconos Mountains, where visitors can choose from 42 lanes. Which, frankly, seems excessive.)

At the front of most of Skibowl’s lanes stood preteens who’d clearly been here before; they clutched their tubes to their chests in readiness. They knew what we were about to learn, which is that we’d be throwing ourselves belly-down onto these tubes. This, we were told, would allow us to drag our toes to control our speed. We found ourselves glad for the time in line to steel ourselves.

I barely remember that first run. I know the wind snapped cold against my face, that I absolutely dragged my toes to slow my pace, and that when I righted myself at the bottom of the hill I felt oddly exhilarated and eager to ride that moving sidewalk skywards again. I relocated my friends, who were similarly breathless, almost sparkle-eyed. And so for the next 90 minutes, we chugged uphill and slid down, perhaps seven or so times. For a couple runs, my friend Megan and I shared a double tube, the tandem bicycle of tubing. The five of us learned to time our runs with each other, urging strangers ahead of us so we could whiz down the hill together, in earshot of each other’s hooting and laughing.

Gimmick? Absolutely. But on the way out, after stopping at the Ratskeller in Government Camp for beers, onion rings, and grease-pooled pizza, where it was warm and thrumming with life, Megan remarked that it felt like we’d just spent a weekend away. We all agreed. Sometimes, a bit of nonsense, neon and swirling, is just the thing you need.