The 47-foot adult female humpback washed onto Stinson Beach Saturday afternoon. On Monday, Park Service machinery operators shoved and tugged at the supine whale for two hours, but managed only to right it onto its stomach.

As the sun set on Monday, workers thought the whale would have to cut into pieces for hauling.

"We went home and thought about it," said Park Service trail worker Joe Monteferante on Tuesday as nearby bulldozers dug around the humpback. "Now we have a plan."

As the burial work forged on, Stinson Beach resident Betsy Haggerty reflected, "It's dramatic out here, with the sun going down... and the full moon. Somebody should throw some flowers. What a funeral."

The larger bulldozer's chain snapped during its first attempt to pull the smaller one out. After a successful second attempt, onlookers erupted in cheers.

"I was saying [the driver] was getting close to that edge," said Stinson Beach resident Bob Cecchini. "And there he went. And these poor bastards have everybody watching them."

The whale - whose age and cause of death are unknown - was the first to wash ashore on Stinson Beach in almost eight years. A dead baby grey whale drifted up there in 1987 and was buried at the south end of the federal beach.

Cordaro said that for decades, humpbacks were rarely seen off the California coast but that their numbers have increased lately. "We should expect more humpback whale strandings than we have had in the past," he said.

Some West Marin residents saw the dead whale bobbing in the surf off Duxbury Reef on Friday. A few complained that the US Coast Guard should have towed it out to sea before it beached.

Kenny Stevens of Stinson Beach suggested the whale at least should have been towed to a remote location north of Bolinas - such as Agate Beach - where "it would have hit up against those rocks and beat itself to pulp."

Resident Art Moritz added, "They run that shipping channel all the time. When they see something like that, they ought to go out and get it."

As it happened, a Park Service ranger on Saturday afternoon asked the Coast Guard to do just that. But both agencies agreed that the whale would have been stuck in the sand before the Coast Guard got into position at the next high tide.

For four days the body created a bizarre scene: Young children jumped on its fins. Tourists photographed each other in front of it. An elderly man pulled a small piece of skin off it and wrapped it in a paper towel.

Another man with a stick poked at the whale's entrails, which were oozing from its mouth. Somebody else carved "Alex BGD" in the whale's skin.

And then there is the stench. "When it first washed up it smelled worse because it was all bloated up," noted Norton on Monday.

"A lot of gases escaped," he said. Still, "you definitely want to get upwind."

Whale biologist Jon Stern, a graduate student working at the Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies, said whales are malodorous dead or alive.

"These things generally smell bad," Stern said. "Whale breath smells like overcooked broccoli. It took us a while to nail that one down."

Meanwhile, Todd Chandler of the Cascadia Research Collective based in Olympia, Washington, shot pictures of the whale's fluke (tail).

The fluke's uniquely serrated edge and scar patterns can help identify the individual animal, Chandler said. His group knows about 600 humpbacks individually - maybe three quarters of the total that feed off the North American coast, he said.

Originally, the Park Service had planned to bury the whale deep in the dunes above the beach, where it wouldn't be uncovered by winter storms.

On Tuesday, workers leveled a path about 50 feet from the surf, and rolled the whale downhill with relative ease. "We had our skeptics," said Park Service crew foreman Al Pond. "But where are they now? We got the job done."

Pond said that enterprising thieves will brave the awful odor and dig the creature up, if the storms don't expose it first. "I'm pretty sure that will happen," he said.

The whale's baleen (elastic food filter) was removed before burial

In theory, the whale was to be blown into a million pieces, with hungry birds flocking down to finish the job.

However, Stern said, the blast merely produced huge blobs of blubber. "It was chunks," he said, "big chunks of whale."

One 200-pound piece "fell onto somebody's Oldsmobile," Stern added. "Just crushed it."