There may be more to the story, if anyone cares. We all seem to agree that relatively few people resupplied through WP, so it wouldn't take much "pressure off the Whitney Trail." Also, the PCT crowd passes through the southern Sierra fairly early in the season when the trail is not as impacted. Furthermore, PCT hikers are highly unlikely to camp along the trail. So if that's the whole explanation for this policy change, to take pressure off the trail, this change will have very little effect.
The next simplest explanation I can think of (using the principle of Ockham's razor) is that a few people created an incident or incidents that brought attention and resulted in a policy change. Inyo has lost a significant amount of revenue and PCT hikers have lost an exit option that everyone else has who started their hike from outside Inyo jurisdiction (reentry back UP the trail is another matter). Something triggered this change. I'm suggesting there is a little more to this story if someone cared enough to keep digging into it. But that's the big question, who cares enough anyway?
