Welcome to the WhitneyZone, Bernie.
1. Road to the Portal: Unless February is warm, you will have several miles of road to hike just to get up to the trailhead.
2. Lower part of the trail depends on storm activity. It can be dry, or it can be a soft snow trailbreaking grind. Hopefully, people will report conditions on the forums in the week or two before your trip. There are guided winter trips up the Mountaineers Route, so if one or more of those groups have preceded you since the last storm activity, you will have a trail to follow.
3. I have been up the final 400 once in snow conditions. There was about 12 inches of fresh snow there, and we broke trail all the way up. The very top was some third class rock climbing. The toughest part coming down is finding the exact point where you start down. The top is a wide open slope, with a sudden break over the edge. Be sure to mark/note the spot when you go up. Guided groups rope up in that section, but many people just take care and make it just fine using ice axe and crampons.
When I did the climb, it took 9 hours from the trail head to Iceberg Lake where we camped. We had to break trail above LBSL. From Iceberg Lk to the notch it can be a posthole nightmare. Too steep for snowshoes, crampons worked fine. It's about a 1500 ft climb. Took us over 4 hours from Iceberg to the summit, but we were carrying all our gear, since we spent the night on top.
