Back in Utah, hey are inmates at Bluffdale tate Prison. But out here in the fire zone, they strut proudly in lack T-shirts proclaiming themselves members of the Flame 'N' Go Hotshots.
'Being in this program makes all the difference,' Bart Clark, 33, a six-time felon who has spent 11 of the last 15 years in prison, said this morning before shouldering his backpack on a hill acrid with smoke. 'Now I can tell my 4-year-old son that his dad isn't in prison, he's out fighting fires.'
Almost every day since mid-May, Mr. Clark -- convicted most recently of kidnapping -- and the rest of his 20-man crew have been outside the wire, battling blazes across the West. The Utah program began in 1985, and as inmate-firefighters this year, the crew is far from alone.
In this devastating fire season, one in six of the crew members fighting fires by hand is a convict, drawn from state prisons in an enterprise that most everyone involved seems to see as benefiting all concerned.
'Sometimes there are special considerations, on account of their being inmates,' said Mike
Melton, a Forest Service official in command of the firefighting effort about 20 miles from this tiny town, deep in the mountains of central Idaho.  'But frankly, we're glad to have any help we can get.'
Other federal officials say the inmates have been invaluable, providing a much needed, well-trained and well-supervised reinforcement to resources that have worn thin.
At wages that average $1 an hour, the use of inmates is a bargain, one that might ease the taxpayers' burden in a year in which federal firefighting costs will exceed $1 billion.
And in conversations here in Idaho and in their Utah prison home, these inmates also described themselves as blessed, seeing fire as a vehicle that has brought not only a taste of freedom but an opportunity to redress old wrongs.
'Most of my life, I took things from other people, and now it's time to give something back,' Tommy Phong, 33, said, puffing a cigarette in the early morning chill as he and the crew prepared to head out. After more than 13 years in prison, Mr. Phong, who was convicted of armed robbery, is scheduled to be paroled early next year, and he said he hoped his three summers fighting fires would prepare him for life outside of prison.
'All that time you're in prison, what's on your mind is to get out on the street,' Mr. Phong said. 'And from my first years as a firefighter, I've seen what it is like.'
As the inmates loaded their gear, they were only one hub in a swirl of activity at the fire camp, home to forest rangers, college students, paramedics and skiers apparently unfazed by having prisoners in their midst.
'With some of the inmate crews, we get an extra security briefing, and the women are supposed to walk around in pairs,' said John Cataldo, 28, a ranger in Alaska's Denali National Park who is on temporary fire duty in Idaho.
'But everyone treats the Flame 'N' Goes like a regular hotshot crew.'
The Utah team is the only crew of inmates to hold a federal designation as 'hotshots,' slang for top-ranking Type I status. They wear the T-shirts, not the orange prison jumpsuits assigned to inmates from California and some other states and -- under state policy -- are accompanied by unarmed escorts from Utah's Department of Corrections, not the gun-carrying officers common to some other inmate camps.
With wages that can reach $5.55 an hour, the Utah crew is better paid than other inmate teams, though the rate is just a fraction of civilian wages.
A civilian firefighter with the same elite status would make about $15 an hour plus overtime.
But in all the heady rush, the prisoners have also been given a sobering reminder that firefighting is not without risk. Two fellow inmate-firefighters were killed recently in Utah in a lightning strike, raising questions about just how much value might be attached to an inmate's life.
The State of Utah has paid only for the inmates' funerals, and state officials say they cannot be confident that the two prisoners will become eligible for federal death benefits of nearly $150,000 that is routinely paid to firefighters slain in action.
'When we signed up, we had to sign a waiver that released the state from any liability,' Michael Kinikini, 33, a member of that team and a convicted robber, said at the Utah prison this week. 'But the bottom line is that we're out there protecting public land, and if we die, the compensation should be the same as for everyone else.'
Of the two men killed, Michael Bishop, 27, had spent seven years in prison for attempted murder, while Roger Braithwaite, 26, had spent three years behind bars after a conviction for vehicular homicide. Both were within 36 months of their scheduled parole dates, a prerequisite for consideration in the Utah crew, and both had been moved to minimum-security quarters, another requirement.
'I wasn't too proud of him when he first went in to prison,' Dan Bishop of Riverton, Utah, said of his late son. 'But I became very, very proud.'
By official count, some 25,000 firefighters are now involved in battling dozens of blazes across the West.