This cute little guy is Wapuutah, the WCSLC Wapuu. What’s a Wapuu? Well, legend has it that one day, when WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg visited Japan in 2009, the Japanese WordPress community asked him if they could design a WordPress mascot. After all, Drupal has the droplet guy, PHP has an elephant, Github has the Octocat, but WordPress…well, we just had a big W. Matt said, sure, so long as it’s GPL and is designed by someone who understands the open source community. Some time later, Wapuu was born, designed by Japanese illustrator Kazuko Kaneuchi (who had previously designed the NetBeans mascot Neko-Bean) and made his (or her) first appearance at WordCamp Fukuoka in 2011.

Since then, Wapuus have come in many shapes and sizes, with WordCamps adopting the cute, furry critter and adding some local color specific to their WordCamp. You can browse through a gallery of past Wapuus on the Wapuu Archive page (my personal favorite is Wapuunk from WordCamp London).

For WordCamp SLC, our little Wapuu takes the camp part of WordCamp literally, and is decked out with everything she needs for a trek through our beautiful mountains visible from the site of WordCamp SLC 2015. Wapuutah was designed by Velda Christensen — you can follow her on Twitter at @supernovia and, when she’s not Engineering Happiness at Automattic, she occasionally blogs at LegendOfVelda.com.