Their mission: scooping up trash.

For the past 14 years, Sussex School students, parents and teachers have been picking up the community's roadside garbage in a blitzkrieg cleanup weekend. It has become their annual rite of spring, a fund-raiser called Echothon.

"We wanted to combine a fund-raiser with an event that gives back to the community," said Robin Etingen-Ayers, Sussex School business manager. "We thought that people swim laps, or ride bikes to raise money, but no one really gets anything for pledging."

Each student in the first through eight grades is responsible for raising a certain amount; this year each of the seventh- and eighth-graders had to haul in the most - at least $350 in pledges. The money raised, about $13,000, goes towards maintaining the private school's vans and to funding educational fields trips that go far beyond Missoula.

"Every spring the trips grow bigger and farther away as the kids get older," Etingen-Ayers said. "Education here is beyond the four walls of our building, it's out in the world, doing hands-on learning."

This year the seventh- and eighth-graders will head to the San Juan Islands to study marine biology while living on a schooner for a week.

It's the trips that motivate the cleanup said student Cascade Tuholske. "For what we get to do on the field trips it's well worth it," he said.

But the cleanup itself inspires a lot of disgusting essays in language arts class on the following Monday.

"Two years ago we found something that looked like a monkey," said Clara Brunner, 13. "We never found out what it was and nobody wanted to pick it up - it was flattened out and really disgusting. And I found four pairs of men's underwear, and yes, they were used."

The all-time grossest find, however, was a dead dog the cleanup crew found on Russell Street near River Road last year, said Brittany Wilson, 13.

"It was basically butchered with its head held up by a stick," she said. "We were so disgusted."

Wilson and her cleanup companion, Faith Morrison, said they still wonder about the mattress they found near the railroad tracks last year.

"It had a huge bump in it and we thought something was in it. There had to be," Wilson said. "Like a body," Morrison said.

They never found out what that lump was. The mattress was hauled to the dump and to this day it remains a mystery.

Early Saturday, however, no additional legends to the roadside trash tales had yet been born.

Then, only the usual items had been discovered: a dead dog; two dead cats; an enormous, dead raptorlike bird; fast food garbage, jackets; moldy socks; a bra; and a Bible.

But the trash, said eighth-grader Emily Williamson, is not just unsightly, it's disturbing because it says more about who we are as a species than we'd like to admit.

"I think it says a whole lot about who we are," she said, scooping up a mound of decayed papers, broken glass and cigarette butts.

"I think we are lazy and that we care more about ourselves than we do about the environment," she said. "It bums me out when I drive by an area we cleaned - a week later it's just trashed."

"I know we are doing a good deed," added Clara Brunner. "But to think we throw this much trash, like shoes and clothing into a big gully of sticks like this, it's just sick."

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