SaltyDog is right on just about everything in this thread. There have been long discussions regarding the "visiting Mt Whitney" rules. I think Inyo N.F. has finally stopped hinting that people coming up from the west side need to have that designation. Inga Aksamit on the JMT and Altitude Acclimatization FB pages made some inquiries and discussions with Inyo staff, and pretty well cleared things up.
As for showing your permit to an Inyo ranger... I would think that if you were to be asked to show your permit once you were on the trail below the North Fork Lone Pine Creek (where the MR joins the main trail), your permit's itinerary would make it pretty obvious that you weren't exiting via Trail Crest.
On another topic: I was away today, looking for a backpack with camera that fell of a snowmobile Sunday. Unfortunately NOAA's predicted 1" of snow was actually almost a foot. So there's a nice old Panasonic Lumix buried somewhere in the snow northwest of Huntington Lk. That's what I get for entrusting someone else with my pack and camera.
