July 11-Muir + Nisqually chute

My good friend Nikki is spending her first summer in Washington...and she likes to ski, a lot. What else to do but take her up skiing on Rainier while I was home for 2 weeks? Muir seemed a logical choice for a first-timer, though I wasn't totally sure what the snow would look like.
We left the lot at 11ish and were able to skin most of the way up with only a few bits of hiking, and then at the very top the suncups made things kind of interesting. The plan for skiing down was to either take the Paradise glacier, which looked nice and smooth, or the Nisqually chute, a little dirty with some rocks scattered around but still looked fun.
We hiked down a bit from Muir to get out of the gnarliest suncups and took off on the western side of the snowfield. Mostly smooth snow, but the dust gave a pretty good base grind down lower. Nisqually chute won out in the end--it really wasn't as bad as it looked, and made for some really fun turns! Also, the snow was completely continuous this direction, and we were able to ski all the way back to the parking lot minus a short hike to get out of the Nisqually basin.
Then, it was off to Adams to ski the SW chutes on Saturday...