FORKS — The grandfather of the Forks Twilight visitor campaign is stepping into retirement this month, leaving the vampires and werewolves to a younger generation.
Mike Gurling, 69, did everything from creating a Twilight trivia contest to guiding hikers to the best trails deep inside Olympic National Park.
Gurling, Forks Mayor Bryon Monohon said, has been a big part of the welcome for the thousands of travelers who enter the Forks Visitors Center each year.
“He’s just so warm and down to earth,” Monohon said. “He has ‘instant friend’ written all over him.”
Gurling will retire as manager of the Forks Visitor Center on Sept. 28, 5½ years after taking a job that began and ended with the publication of the vampire-teenage angst series of novels set in Forks, LaPush and Port Angeles.
The series spawned a series of films, the next one of which, “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2,” opens Nov. 16.
The Forks Chamber of Commerce threw Gurling a retirement party at the chamber luncheon Sept. 12, but the very next day, he was back on the job, painting two trucks to represent those driven by Twilight heroine Bella Swan.
It’s fitting task, in that Gurling ties his history at the visitor center with the craze that has brought tens of thousands to the small municipality.
When he retired after 34 years as a national park ranger in 2007, Gurling wanted to stay busy.
A week later, he btook a new job.
“I thought my parks knowledge could help the visitors center,” Gurling said.
Chamber of Commerce director Marcia Bingham said it was “absolutely predestination” that Gurling would become available when he did.
“This man has more knowledge of the Olympic National Park than we could dream of,” she said.
Although his second passion was book, “I never in my wildest dreams imagined that I would be involved in something like this,” Gurling said.
“When I moved to Forks in 1988, I had no idea there were werewolves and vampires here,” he joked.
Within weeks of his starting at the center in 2007, people started arriving who weren’t the usual tourists.
“They looked kind of sheepish,” he said. “They said they were here because of a book.”
Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer of Arizona, had been published in 2005.
It was followed by New Moon in 2006 and Eclipse in 2007.
The saga was the tale of a teenage girl in a love triangle with a vampire and a werewolf.
A fourth book, Breaking Dawn, came out in 2008.
Gurling and Bingham quickly decided to keep the visitor center open seven days a week.
“He and I embraced it,” said Bingham.
Gurling started small, poring over the books to create trivia questions for tourists to complete.
As the series’ popularity took off, Gurling helped launch an aggressive campaign to bring visitors to Forks, including a tour bus, maps of book locations and an annual Stephenie Meyer Day celebration based on Bella Swan’s birthday.
“We were going to hold it on Stephenie Meyer’s birthday, but she was born on Dec. 24,” Gurling said.
Once the first movies came out, a new flood of “Twihards” descended, reaching nearly 70,000 registered visitors in 2010.
Yet Gurling never lost his roots as a park ranger.
He continued to help non-Twilight fans — and the less-than-thrilled parents of Twihard tweens — pointers on hiking or camping in Olympic National Park.
Now, Gurling is preparing to turn over managing the center to Lissy Andros, currently the chamber’s tourism and marketing manager.
Andros will start her new job Oct. 1.
Once she has the center in hand, Gurling said he plans to travel, especially next summer.
It will be a new experience for him, he said: “Working as a park ranger, we never got to take time off in summer.”
Then Twilight came along, and a new summer job.
But finding places to go won’t be a problem.
“I’ve got a bucket list,” Gurling said, and 40 summers to make up for.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arwyn.rice@peninsuladailynews.com.
