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Nocturnal Wonderland makes you pick on Saturday and lets you split on Sunday

86 sets, five stages, two nights. Saturday makes you pick one whole set at a time. Sunday lets you have half of two.

Nocturnal Wonderland has put out its set times for Saturday and Sunday at Glen Helen in San Bernardino. It is 86 sets on five stages, 3pm to midnight both days. All five stages are playing the whole nine hours on Saturday, and all but 15 minutes of it on Sunday.

The two days are built differently. It is worth knowing how before you go.

Saturday: pick one

On Saturday, Mystic Wild, Dawn Mountain and Beatbox Boombox each run nine one-hour sets. Every set starts on the hour and ends on the hour, with no break between them. So nine times that day, three sets start at the same minute and stop at the same minute.

That means there is no catching the second half of anything on those stages. Stay for a set and you see none of the other two. Walk over at half past and you get half of each.

The calls that hurt:

The 11pm call is bigger than it looks. Green Velvet is already half an hour into a set on Aurora Plains, and Basstripper 15 minutes into one on Rave Cave. All five stages stop at midnight. Your last hour of Saturday is one of five, and you choose it by 11.

If you want a bit of everything, Aurora Plains is the stage to come back to. After 8pm it runs longer sets that do not line up with the hour. Patrick Topping plays 8 to 9:15, then Partiboi69 9:15 to 10:30. Leave either one at the top of the hour and you still walk into a full set somewhere else.

Sunday: split it

On Sunday the clocks come apart. Aurora Plains and Beatbox Boombox stay on the hour. Dawn Mountain moves to the half hour after its first set. Mystic Wild drifts: its sets start at quarter to, then ten to, then five to the hour.

So on Sunday most clashes are half an hour, not a whole one. Saturday has 50 pairs of sets that start and stop at exactly the same time. Sunday has 23. You can have half of two things far more often.

The best of it is the end of the night. Seven Lions plays Mystic Wild 9:55 to 10:55. TroyBoi plays Dawn Mountain 10:30 to 11:30. Illenium closes Mystic Wild, 11 to midnight. Watch the first 35 minutes of Seven Lions, catch TroyBoi's first half hour, and be back for all of Illenium. Or stay with TroyBoi to 11:30 and give up the start of Illenium. There is no way to see all three in full.

Earlier, the same move works twice. LAYZ on Dawn Mountain, 8:30 to 9:30, overlaps SIDEPIECE on Mystic Wild, 8:50 to 9:50, by 40 minutes. Hedex, 9:30 to 10:30, runs into the first 35 minutes of Seven Lions.

Coming from Lost Lands

Lost Lands runs the same weekend in Ohio, and 16 artists on this bill play both. Fourteen of them play Ohio first.

The tightest turnaround is Basstripper. The Lost Lands set closes Raptor Alley, starting at 3am Saturday Ohio time. The Nocturnal Wonderland set starts at 10:45pm Saturday California time, 22 hours and 45 minutes later. Illenium's Lost Lands set on Saturday night starts 27 hours and 10 minutes before the Sunday close here. Lost Lands does not list end times, so those are start to start.

The full grid is on the Nocturnal Wonderland event page. Save the sets you want before you go, and decide the 11pm Saturday call in advance.

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