With Tibet still closed and only the southern approach available, the obvious challenge was the huge Southwest Face rising from the Western Cwm.
They were stopped at the top by a huge crevasse but traced a possible line up the Western Cwm (cirque, or valley) to the South Col, the high saddle between Lhotse and Everest.
I didn't quite know what to expect, having been only to Welsh funerals where the choir sings Cwm Rhondda and the readings are heavily laced with foreboding.
Participation in the National Eisteddfod of Wales led to him being cast, while in his final year at school, in Welsh-language soap opera Pobol y Cwm.
* Britain's most successful mountaineer has become the first person to scale the three peaks of Mount Everest's Western Cwm in one climb.
While he admits translation as an aid, it cannot equal the impact of reading say Aristotle in the original (CWM 15,101).
More's most direct statements on the cultural issue of the age occur in four letters which he wrote between 1515 and 1519 to Martin Dorp, to Oxford, to Edward Lee and "to a monk" (all now in CWM 15).
Though More's wife finds his prison claustrophobic, the only difference between his cell and her chamber is that his lock is outside, while hers is inside (CWM 12, 277).
Among those ferried down the mountain was Dan Mazur, a Bristol-based guide who had been stuck at camp one in the Western Cwm since Saturday.
More than 600,000 people speak Welsh to varying degrees of fluency, and on average 100,000 tune into S4C's Welsh-language soperaPobolPobol Y Cwm (People of the Valley).
Related: Nepal earthquake: death toll could reach 10,000, says PM – live updates The climbers, including British guides and their clients, had been trapped at camps one and two on the mountain's Western Cwm since Saturday, when a series of avalanches triggered by the weekend's powerful earthquake devastated Everest base camp below them, killing 18 foreign climbers and Sherpas, and injuring 61.
