A very tall figure in Pierce County, Washington

My friend R-- and his wife and myself and my wife went out toward Mt. Rainier to do some trap shooting. We turned onto a very bumpy, pot-holed gravel road a few miles from the town of Ashford. After getting through a number of trees that had blown down in the wind storms of winter, 2006, we reached a dead-end at a bridge over the Nisqually River that had washed out in the record rains and flooding of November, 2006. We were about a mile...maybe more..from the nearest blacktop road and any human habitation. We had decided to make a day of shooting so we brought an automatic trap machine, several boxes of biodegradable clay pidgions, LOTS of shotgun shells in trap loads, chairs, a folding table, plenty of food and drinks (coffee, water, fruit juices, tea) however...no alcohol because my friend and his wife are diabetic and I take meds that don't mix well with alcohol. Therefore, we just don't drink. Besides, booze and guns NEVER go well together under ANY circumstances. After several hours of shooting clays, we decided to have a bite to eat and sat down at the table we had set up right behind my open truck canopy. We were eating and talking and listening to some great oldies on an MP3 radio when I noticed my friend R-- looking intently into the forest behind me. I asked him what he was looking at and he said he wasn't sure. He said that he saw what looked like a very large stump about 25-30 yards back in the woods when it appeared to move slightly. When it did so, R-- said that for a few moments he could see daylight under the stump----as if he were looking between someones' legs, which then disappeared after it moved. Of course we all looked and sure enough, through a long, narrow opening in the trees we could see what looked to be a very large, dark stump with a somewhat rounded pointy top. The "stump" looked to be about 7-8 feet tall and at least 3 feet wide. It was hard to gage height because the undergrowth was so thick and dense that it was hard to know how much of the "stump" was hidden from our view from the ground up. Something that we began to notice as we looked around was that we saw a few other stumps but none of them were as large or as tall as the "stump" we were looking at, nor were there any trees that were even close to the diameter of our stump anywhere. Also, the other stumps were obviously cut down with a chain saw leaving a fairly flat--maybe slightly angled or beveled top on them. Our stump angled up from both sides to a slightly rounded point in the middle. It did not move. We all watched the stump and talked and joked about what it could be. After a half hour or so, the stump was still there, not moving, so we decided to go back to shooting trap. I think by this time we had all come to regard the "stump" as just that, a stump in the woods. The movement my friend saw was attributed to the fact that the wind was blowing and the moving tree branches created moving patterns of shadow and light in the forest. After about another hour of shooting we decided to start cleaning up and getting ready to leave. I sat on my chair to put my shotgun in its' case and without really thinking, I glanced back into the forest to look at the stump. It was gone! I thought maybe I had moved the chair and was looking in the wrong place. So, I moved the chair around and found that there was only one narrow opening through the trees where the "stump" could have been and there was no getting around the fact that it was not there. I called R-- over and told him that the stump was gone. He too looked and looked and could not locate our stump. Our wives by now were there and they too agreed that the "stump" was gone and that they were more than ready to leave, A.S.A.P. We began to go over any possible explanation for what we had seen. Deer? Nope. Too small and even if a deer had been standing perfectly facing us, we should have seen the narrowing of the chest into the neck and the small head and large ears. Elk? Nope. Same arguement as with a deer. Bear? Well, if it was a bear, it would have had to have been standing on its' hind legs facing directly at us and not moving a muscle for at least a half an hour...probably more. Besides, we should have seen the outline of the bears' body narrowing to a neck and then going to the nearly round profile of a bears' head, and again, we saw no ears. Also, it would have had to have been an absolutely HUGE bear to equal the height and bulk of the "stump". Also, we could not imagine any of the afore-mentioned animals staying around as close as this for so long a time considering we had shot around 300 rounds of 12 and 20 gauge shotgun shells in the time we were there. As we began to drive back out to the highway we officially went on "sasquatch watch". It was the only thing that fit what we had seen. This area is totally wild and all any creature would have to do is cross the Nisqually River for nearly complete solitude because of the washed-out bridge. What really began to shake us up was the fact that whatever this was that we saw was not afraid of us or the noise and concussion of our shotguns. It appeared to be observing us at the time we first noticed it and it remained stock-still for 30-45 minutes while we observed it at a distance of 25-30 yards. How long it was in the area watching us before we noticed it or how long it stayed around after we lost sight of it is un-nerving to say the least. Was it watching us out of curiosity or was it being territorial and wanted to see who was on its' turf? It sure makes us wonder. While sasquatch has long been a topic of lite conversation on our various shooting and fishing trips, this incident certainly has us believing that maybe there IS something out there in our forests that we don't know about. We can't prove its' existance beyond our sighting and the multitude of others who have seen something they can't explain. I know from now on, every trip into the forest will hold a whole new sense of wonder and exitement and will have a renewed expectation and hope that we might see something again to further explain what we saw today!