Congrats on whitney. Did you have any problems with the altitude? Although I guess you probably acclimitized fairly well after 60 miles. I'll be doing a 3 day backpack to the summit later this year.

I have the same filter, and you do have to be really careful with cross contamination. They even supply you with a special ziploc bag (labeled "outlet hose" or something like that) to keep the inlet and outlet hoses separate. I usually keep the outlet hose in the ziplock, and wrap the inlet around the filter. This is the opposite of what is called for in the instructions, but it's much easier to keep the inside of the ziploc clean, rather than put the contaminated hose in it and keep the rest of the bag clean. Usually, the outside of the filter is already dirty anyway, so wrapping the inlet hose around it doesn't cause problems.

That is one of the drawbacks to this filter, having to handle so many hoses while filtering. It's definitely a two person job to filter water with it. The MSR is better in this regard because it connect directly to the bottle, so you only need to deal with the inlet hose. I would have purchased the MSR filter, but it's bigger and heavier, plus I had one fail on a backpack trip before so I didn't want to risk having that happen again.