Brent, you are right, we were FLYING! A lot of things played into the rapid decent.
1. After summiting, we met a group of younger hikers heading toward the section with the windows. The first girl was wearing sneakers, sweatpants, a light jacket and a small pack. Her friends (guy and girl - all in the their 20s), were dressed a little more appropriately but still didn't look prepared for the weather. We actually warned other hikers arriving at Trail Camp as we were leaving that a small group of young hikers may be in trouble on the switchbacks because the snow had arrived so suddenly. Anyway... The amazing thing was that they left THE PORTAL at a little after 4am and were about to summit by about 11:15am or so. We applauded them for their speed! My buddy and I thought we were a little slow on the way up to the summit so we wanted to make up for lost time on the decent. I think we did. But shortly after packing up at trail camp and heading for the car, the same group of younger people came up on us quick. They had summitted and were heading back for the car too. They had so much steam as they hiked, it's still incredible to me. To estimate that they were hiking at 4 mph would not be an exaggeration. In the white out! I can remember the lighting and thunder and trying to stay up with them as a group as we went down. There were places where the "kids" in their SNEAKERS were leaping through the snow, running, dancing from rock to rock... It was too much for us and we let them get out of reach by outpost camp. They were robots, cyborgs! They had taken 2 Diamox pills each, not sure if that had something to do with it. They all drove multiple hours to whitney, and they were all heading back home after the hike. They reached the bottom at least one hour before we did, which puts their entire time on the mountain at about 14 hours. They were hiking machines. I want to say we reached Lone Pine Lake by 5:30 thanks to their pace setting through the blizzard. It couldn't comprehend their speed. My buddy and I are still talking about it. We still hiked fast from Lone Pine Lake to the portal but it still took us about an hour and 15 minutes.
2. We had to drive to Vegas right after the hike so we wanted to make it their at a reasonable hour.
3. We rushed to try and get below the snow line but that didn't really happen until somewhere around the John Muir Wilderness sign.
Yeah, I am very thankful to have summited even if the experience wasn't typical. Can't really imagine any two hikes on Whitney being the same.
