Whatever was in the black trash bag abandoned on the side of Roblar Road, it smelled terrible.
And it looked like something that should be checked out in a crime lab, Petaluma cyclist Yuri Hauswald said Saturday.
"It looked like some questionable stuff, possibly a rotting animal carcass," he said.
Hauswald marked the location of the bag using a global positioning satellite and got back on his bike and peddled off with his pack of cyclists.
Hauswald, 35, who races mountain and road bikes when he's not teaching third grade at La Tercera Elementary School in Petaluma, was part of a corps of volunteers who fanned out across Sonoma County back roads Saturday to help clean up illegal trash dumps.
Three groups cycling out of Petaluma and one solo rider out of Sonoma, logged almost 200 miles and marked 125 trash heaps on GPS equipment loaned by the REI outdoor equipment store in Santa Rosa.
The trash came in all types. Junked mattresses, tires, trailers filled with trash, an engine block, a sofa, a water heater and even what looked like the contents of an entire kitchen.
Ario Bigattini, a Petaluma telecom engineer and manager with Cisco Systems, used to joke with his Soulcraft bike racing teammates about hugging a junked roadside refrigerator for a team picture. Then, he thought, why not help clean it up?
Bigattini came up with the idea for the rides a month ago and enlisted the help of Petaluma City Councilman Keith Canevaro, Sonoma County Supervisor Mike Kerns, county waste manager Ken Wells and other volunteers. County officials are committed to picking up the trash marked by the cyclists.
Experienced riders are heading out on steeper, longer rides of 75 miles and more today. Other rides will be planned again with more notice - and more riders - next spring, Bigattini said.
Volunteers included members of two local racing teams, a handful of elementary and high school teachers, an attorney, mechanic and a salesman.
During a brief stop Saturday in a parking lot on Watertrough Road, three cyclists on one team, clad in aerodynamic riding helmets and brightly colored riding outfits, gave off a superhero-ish glow of exertion, purpose and indignation.
"We ride in one of the most beautiful areas in the world, and we see so much trash," said Raghu Belur, 38, of Rohnert Park, an electrical engineer.
Belur was one of a group of nine that departed Petaluma at 9 a.m. It took them nearly three hours to travel 22 miles, and in that time they encountered 23 large deposits of trash. It took so much time to stop and mark them that six of the nine had had to leave for other engagements.
"It was overwhelming and frustrating," said Jason Clymer, 33, an automotive parts salesman from Novato.
But they set off again, with 8? miles to go to Occidental, the end of their assigned route. Belur predicted they'd find trash on Burnside Road.
Perhaps a mile away, they turned onto Burnside Road and stopped about 100 yards just beyond a curve.
It was at the base of a telephone pole. A pile, about 3-feet by 2-feet across, of some indistinguishable lump of what appeared to be Sheetrock, gauze, plastic mesh and a coffee cup. Nearby lay a 50 milliliter plastic bottle of peppermint Schnapps, a small soda cup from Jack-in-the-Box, a foot-long piece of yellow police tape, and an empty bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.
Coordinates entered, the team rode away.
The results of the rides were downloaded into topographic software donated by REI. Bigattini said he'd have the dump sites printed out on maps and to the county on Monday.
Kerns said public works and probation crews would use the maps to pick up the garbage, maybe with the help of local garbage companies.
"If they're willing to take the time to locate this stuff, we can certainly come up with the manpower to make sure it does get picked up," Kerns said. "We have over 1,400 miles of roadway in the unincorporated area so obviously there are not enough resources to search and check every road. To have groups like this out there provides a real benefit."
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