Bob Kamps

Born in Wisconsin, he began climbing in California in 1955, and was a member of that cadre of Yosemite pioneers who first ascended many of its great walls in the 1950s and 1960s.

Kamps bouldered almost everywhere he climbed for any length of time, and John Gill joined him on numerous occasions in the Tetons and Black Hills.

In the Tetons in 1958, Kamps teamed with Chouinard to make the first ascent of the imposing Satisfaction Buttress; but the two were turned back the following year on an attempt on the forbidding north face of the Crooked Thumb on 12,325-foot (3,757 m) Teewinot Mountain, when Chouinard's aid pitons pulled out of the decomposing rock and he took a 150-foot (46 m) fall through open space, held on belay by Kamps.

That same year, Kamps and Higgins - both highly proficient on slabs and faces with tiny holds - climbed Lucky Streaks on Fairview Dome in Tuolumne Meadows, (Hard 5.10).

The granite Needles of the Black Hills of South Dakota – slim spires ranging from twenty to well over a hundred feet in height – were a favorite summer playground for Kamps.

In 1971 the American Alpine Club published his Climber's Guide to the Needles in the Black Hills of South Dakota that was based on the earlier work of Jan and Herb Conn.