The radiant heat cooks the lungs so thoroughly that even triathletes keel over. The roar of burning trees can grow so intense you'd swear it sounded like a fleet of jets taking off. Cornered by flames? Cover yourself tortoise-style with a tin foil-like protector. Then pray you don't get "burned over."

Few professions beside firefighting offer lower pay in return for the highest risk of physical harm, but that never put a damper on Becky Blankenship's enthusiasm. After working for two years on the U.S. Forest Service's trail crew from afar, she jumped at the chance of getting her "red card" training certificate for firefighting.

Two "blow-ups" -- sudden flare-ups of forest land -- during a 2001 firefight in the Uinta Mountains might have scared off any other first-timer.

"I loved it," Blankenship said.

So much so, in fact, that she began chronicling her experiences through photography.

The soot in your nostrils, bathing in creeks, endless diet of M&Ms and meals-ready-to-eat faded compared to the camaraderie. Walk into a restaurant of cheering patrons after long days of putting out a forest fire and even the multitude of aches in your body seems to melt.

Wendy Blankenship, Becky's older sister and an MFA-educated poet, noticed that her sister's life on the "hotshot" crew was not just a lifestyle, but often a separate language.

Sitting in the back seat as their mother drove around their Wellsville home near Logan, Wendy was struck by words Becky used. A "cat-face tree" was one burnt out, or burning, near the trunk. A "widow maker" was a burnt tree so precariously fragile the fall of a branch might kill. Most poetic of all was "along the black," the burn-out safety zone fire fighters retreated into when things "got gunny" near a burning forest.

"I just saw it as another day of work. Wendy saw it as poetry," Becky said.

What both sisters soon realized was that their complementary views -- Becky's photography and Wendy's poetry -- would make for a bracing book. The result, Along The Black , is a 46-page homage to the grit and courage of one of the world's most dangerous professional callings.

The book's photographs capture not just the process of putting out acres of flaming forestland and the backbreaking weight of that work. They also pause to record firefighters' down time on far away dirt roads, plus the vacant, eerie remains of fire's destructive power. Collected from the many fires the younger Blankenship faced down in Idaho, Utah and Montana, the book is a page-by-page descent into a fire's immense center at middle, closed by firefighters' journey home amid ash and embers. The final page lists names of firefighters, two of whom Becky knew of, who died fighting some of the mountain West's most recent fires.

A casual thumb-through suggests parallels to hell, or other heavy-handed metaphors. While aware of easy symbolism, Wendy said her verse works in a more direct fashion. One stanza, in fact, belies the sight of a line of firefighters pitched only yards from a wall of fire: "Silhouettes, we are all/walking the flames/lighting our way/the speech of headlamps/a type of peace."

Wendy, who teaches middle-grade students at Horizonte Instruction and Training Center, said firefighting's poetic potential had immediate attraction.

"Fire has this mystery to it. It's beautiful, but dangerous, and the only people who go there are firefighters," she said. "You won't find a whole lot of metaphors [in the poems]. I don't go over the top."

Many of Becky's photos had been used by Scott Bushman, her superintendent with the Logan Hotshots, for training and presentation purposes. Now an assistant fire management officer with the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, Bushman remembers Becky as consistent and determined.

"In the 'shot' world you get yourself into some real long, dirty hauls. Becky was always fun, always keeping people going," Bushman said. "I used to get after her a lot for her photos because I like pictures of people working hard. A lot of her photographs seemed to be of people taking breaks. I said, 'Becky, I want photos of people working!' She said, 'Well, I had to dig lines, too. I wasn't always shooting photos.' I had no answer to that one."

The book's aim is simple, said the Blankenships: document and put to poetry the hardscrabble life of firefighting, the kind of work that, if it doesn't engulf you whole in flames, will spit you out with alarming speed due to its bone-crunching physical demands. While she hopes to take on many more fires in the future, Becky has already secured her helicopter pilot's license so she can fight fires in a different capacity.

"It's mean work," she said. "A book like this is acknowledgment. It's credit due."