In order to avoid walking through many waterfalls and getting our feet wet we came down via the Old Trail, which goes from the Whitney Portal Parking lot Picnic Area and to the John Muir Wilderness sign on the trail.
Seems a lot of people are going back to taking the original hiking trail vs the newer, super long equestrian trail. Might cut off almost 1 mile?
You can see the switchbacks 50 yards to the east of the wilderness border. That is, basically parallel to the main trail between N fork and the next set of switchbacks heading up towards LP lake:
