Jim Weir wrote:

The point is the same point that Edmund Hillary and his small civilian band had
when they climbed Everest. Sure, Patton's Third Army could have done it by
sheer muscle power and expensive engineering, but Hillary did it with finesse.

snip

Well, no. The 1953 expedition did it along military logistic lines, as did the
earlier Himalayan expeditions to the great peaks. The leader of the expedition was
Brigadier Hunt, and the planning required to move supplies and people up the
mountain was analogous to supplying a 6-8 week military campaign, with Sherpas
acting as porters. After it was done that way well into the '70s, smaller, lighter
weight expeditions started to try and climb Everest and other big Himalayan peaks
'alpine-style', i.e. the climbers themselves carried all their food and gear with
them and climbed in a more or less continuous push from bottom to top. Alpine-style
is quicker, lighter, faster, and cheaper (one Japanese expedition in the '70s
employed over 700 porters getting their gear to base camp, with a couple of hundred
on the mountain itself).

Increased knowledge of extreme altitudes and improved technique and equipment made
such climbs possible. Perhaps the ultimate in finesse and style on Everest was set
by Reinhold Messner's solo climb without oxygen via the North Ridge in the early
'80s. He did have a little support; his girlfriend went to his base camp with him,
and waited for him there. OTOH, even he was mostly climbing a known route. However,
except for the last several hundred yards, so were Hillary and Tenzing, as Tenzing
had been to around the South Summit @ 28,700 ft. (IIRR; possibly they didn't get
that high) the year before with (IIRC) Raymond Lambert, as part of the Swiss
expedition. Bourdillon and Evans had certainly gotten to the South Summit before
retreating, a few days before Hillary and Tenzing made the second attempt that went
the rest of the way.

The 'tourist' climbs of the South Col route nowadays are done in the old style,
because most of the people involved lack the climbing skills and conditioning to do
it on their own. Expert climbers do old or new routes alpine style.

Guy