125 is a big, important number. That’s why Sunday’s party celebrating the 125th anniversary of Rock Creek Park really tried to nail that number home.

Although the presidential signature that created Rock Creek Park actually occurred on September 27, 1890, the kickoff party for this anniversary year was on January 25th (1/25). The celebration started at 1:25 p.m. Opening speaker Scott Siff, President of the Rock Creek Conservancy, also quipped that to keep on theme, there were 125 guests in the ballroom of the Omni Shoreham.

But the purpose of kicking off Rock Creek Park’s big anniversary in January rather than September wasn’t solely for the sake of adorably playing with numbers. It also allowed various government officials and non-governmental organizations to reveal their plans for celebrating and revitalizing Rock Creek Park in its milestone year.

The organizations that kicked off this celebration also announced a new thematic slogan: “Find Yourself in Rock Creek Park.” As such, they announced that a smartphone app by that name would be launched to allow users to do just that—literally. A GPS app specific to the park already exists, but in demonstrating the new one, Rock Creek Conservancy Executive Director Matt Fleischer showed that this app would connect to Google Maps and help users get trail directions. Not content for the app to serve merely one purpose, the app’s developers also added a feature that would allow users to look up an event schedule for the park and add those events to their own Facebook calendar.

Rock Creek Park’s Superintendent Tara Morrison also mentioned that part of her plan for 2015 was to create a Rock Creek Park Stewardship program. She introduced the Green Ribbon Panel, a committee and braintrust of government officials, non-profit leaders, and environmental experts that expressed their own wishes for the park.

Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton voiced her ongoing struggle to have a path in the park named after famed marine biologist (and Rock Creek Park enthusiast) Rachel Carson. Rachel Goslins, the Executive Director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities said that she’d love to see public art reshape people’s experience of the park, the way that the Gates did for Central Park. Mark Buscaino, Executive Director of Casey Trees, said he hoped to convince homeowners bordering the park to annex their backyard space to the park itself.

The afternoon also served as an informational meeting about the park: Did you know that Rock Creek Park is over twice the size of New York’s Central Park? (no? Now you do. You did? Cool); similarly, you might not have known that the famed Sequoia National Park in California was established a mere three days before Rock Creek Park; or that President (and outdoorsman) Teddy Roosevelt reportedly skinny dipped in Rock Creek Park (although Goslins said incredulously, “I can think of several places where he might have skinny waded!”).

Nearly everyone at the celebration expressed a very personal experience with Rock Creek Park. Some had always lived within five minutes of the park. Some had a favorite rock that they would lay upon every weekend to relax. Others took their children there on a regular basis. But it was Norton that made the insightful comment about not needing not be a native Washingtonian to enjoy Rock Creek Park: “Please understand how much more we need to do to make [Rock Creek Park] important to more than 125 people.”