Join us as Pro Paintball player Ryan Greenspan of San Diego Dynasty recalls his recent worldwide adventure!

We always love hearing about our favorite players taking time to explore the world, travel and meet new challenges. Ryan Greenspan was kind enough to share part of his recent journey with us. Please enjoy our presentation of Greenspan’s latest trip- and perhaps more in the future!

“It has been a while since I have had any sort of writing column, so forgive me if my writing is a bit rusty.  I wanted to do a fun adventure article about my absolute domination of Mt Kilimanjaro but that involves zero paintball whatsoever. With that in mind I figure that with the space I have allocated in this article, I would give my readers a small taste of the off season that way we get some paintball in along the way. So here goes a brief three month off season that took me across four continents, because I like to keep it simple.

Every year after the final event is wrapped up, the US paintball season quiets down and most of the Dynasty guys hang up their jerseys for a few months of much needed time off.  For me on the contrary, things are just getting started. The off season, at times, marks my busiest month.  I’m not much of a cold weather fan, so I pack my bags and head south for the winter to Australia where the weather is warm.

This year I had a month planned, and as it is my 15th sum odd trip, I tried to make it a bit of a vacation, but Australia a huge country and I had a lot of fields and stores to visit and host clinics and signings! Here’s a quick round up of the cities and events, try to keep count! I played the Masters in Sydney, didn’t win, flew to Melbourne for a clinic at campbellfield indoor. Then went out to the back country for some wake boarding and paintball at Semoz paintball on the boarder of Victoria and NSW. From here I went to Newcastle for a night clinic at XBALL paintball. Immediately after that I had a long haul flight across the country to Perth to visit some friends, this marked my one bit of vacation that I got. Dash paintball hosted a small event there, then it was back on a plane to Adelaide for a night, then I did Melbourne again for 12 hours, up to Brisbane for 24 hours, then back to Melbourne to rest for my flight home.  The last three cities I had to shower at the airport in order to save time.

That I was my Australian trip, seven cities spanning across a country larger than the US in just under a month!

Next was a quick rest up at home for NYE then I tackled another countless amount of hours traveling to make it over to Africa’s east coast of Tanzania.  This is when a real adventure began! This was the first non paintball related trip I have been on for a long time. It was, by no means, a relaxing trip though.  I went out there to climb Mt Kilimanjaro.  I am not entirely sure why I decided to do this; I guess you could say it was a personal goal that I had made up on the fly. I actually really dislike camping and hiking, on the contrary, I really love hotels, great food and beaches.  Kind of odd that I made this choice, but I was over in the area, so I figured why not.

For those who are unfamiliar, Kilimanjaro is Africa’s tallest mountain standing 19,432ft from sea level.  I will put this simply for you, it sucked, it really sucked!!

In the interest of making a long story short, I will skip to the last night.  After a long five days of hiking, we started the summit attack at 11:30pm, the temp was a brisk 20F at that point. A few hours into our ascent the temperature rapidly dropped to 10F and my camelback froze, the winds picked up to a swift 45-50mph, whipping up every bit of the dry loose dust and rocks on the mountain side.  To add to the pleasantries of the hike, the air was getting increasingly thin as we got higher and higher. Please keep in mind that we were doing this in the pitch black.  Fast forward another several hours and it is now 6am and we reach the crater rim, still several hundred feet below the summit.  From here, we have absolutely zero cover from the elements and the temperature gauge now reads between 2-5F, difficult to read because only one eye works properly at this point from the dust, and the batteries in my head lamp have died due to the extreme cold. The group’s spirits are slowly fading, but victory is within reach. At 630am we reached the highest point in Africa.  This was an accomplishment that was trumped by the extreme weather and the fact that we were 20 minutes early and the sun still hadn’t come up yet!  I had a celebratory beer in my bag that I had surrounded by hand warming packs to thwart the freezing temps, but that would mean taking my gloves off to open it, and that wasn’t an option for me, so I saved it for a more appropriate time…”