Houston and Bates planned the expedition as a lightweight one, incorporating many elements of what would later become known as the Alpine style. There were practical reasons for this as well as stylistic ones. Since partition, the Indian Sherpas who had traditionally served as porters on Himalayan expeditions were unwelcome in Pakistan, and few of the Hunza porters who would replace them had genuine mountaineering skills. Given the technical difficulty of the Abruzzi Spur it was therefore impractical to use porters to carry loads high on the mountain, so it was planned to use them only as far as Camp II. Additionally the steepness of the Abruzzi Spur meant there was limited flat space for tents, and camp sites to accommodate large numbers of climbers would be difficult to find. Houston and Bates therefore planned to assemble a small team of eight climbers and no high-altitude porters. The size of the team ruled out the use of supplemental oxygen as there would not be enough manpower to carry the extra weight up the mountain, but Houston was confident from his own wartime experiments, as well as the experience of the pre-war British Everest expeditions, that it would be possible to climb K2 without it.