An excerpt from Outside Magazine, April 2011:

By Devon O’Neil

GLOBAL RESCUE fashions itself as a new kind of crisis-response firm: a high-end security blanket with medevac capabilities. While the company occasionally pulls clients out of disaster areas, war zones, and scenes of political turmoil—earlier this year, the team evacuated more than 200 people from Egypt—it works primarily as a medical fixer, quickly arranging for injured travelers to get the care they need. Because of its ability to send medics to, say, the Hima­layas, Global Rescue has become the service of choice for many adventurers. Its diverse client list includes travel outfitter Geographic Expeditions, the U.S. Ski Team, surfers Jordy Smith and Mick Fanning, and mountaineer Ed Viesturs. “If you’re out there in the boonies and you need to get rescued, you never know what it’s going to cost,” says Viesturs. “I don’t know of any other company that does what they do.”

The American Alpine Club (AAC) provides Global Rescue medevac coverage to all of its 8,000 members. That came in handy last March for alpinist Steve House when he fell 80 feet off the north face of Mount Temple, in Banff National Park, fracturing his pelvis, spine, and several ribs. After a team from Parks Canada extracted House, Global Rescue sent a paramedic to stay with him at a Calgary hospital, then flew him home to Oregon in a private jet. Global Rescue also recovers bodies—most recently, the remains of American climber Joe Puryear, who died last October on Tibet’s 24,170-foot Labuche Kang.

A basic Global Rescue membership with medevac costs $329 per year. Individual security coverage, which includes evacuations from war zones, runs $655… Red Bull, the U.S. State Department, and NASA are among the clients. Though it might seem surprising that the State Department would hire a private company to safeguard its employees, doing so may prevent a broken bone from becoming a diplomatic incident.

“We don’t fit any of the categories that people apply to us,” says Richards, a muscular 215-pound graduate of Middlebury College and Dartmouth’s Tuck Business School. “We’re certainly not in the insurance business. We’re not a security firm—we don’t guard static locations. We are in the rescue business. We respond to crises. At the end of the day, we represent the red button these people push.”