Kamps climbed extensively in California, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, and South Dakota. His climbing partners included Mark Powell, Dave Rearick, Tom Higgins, and Yvon Chouinard. 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 Teewinot Mountain, when Chouinard's aid pitons pulled out of the decomposing rock and he took a fall through open space, held on belay by Kamps. (The climb was completed seven years later by Pete Cleveland).