Our Staff

Kara Dohrenwend, Director
As Rim to Rim’s executive director, Kara cultivates relationships with project partners, maintains a strong organizational vision, and provides high-level oversight of various regeneration projects. She has many decades’ experience caring for southeast Utah’s watersheds and has strong relationships with various local, state, and federal land-management agencies.
Kara is heavily involved in various watershed and ecosystem management initiatives on the Colorado Plateau. She serves as a supervisor on the Grand Conservation District, and has served on both the City of Moab Planning Commission and the Youth Garden Project board. She holds a Utah Water Rights Certification and has held various other certifications for services varying from landscape contracting to pollination conservation. She also founded the native plant nursery Wildland Scapes.
Kara started Rim to Rim after a decade leading summer work projects in Mill Creek Canyon that engaged local youth with hands-on riparian restoration. She first moved to southeastern Utah in 1993 to caretake at Horsethief Ranch. Kara holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley in landscape architecture with an emphasis on urban stream restoration, and a minor in city planning.
Kara is passionate about finding ways to regenerate native plant communities in the beautiful, xeric landscapes of the Upper Colorado Plateau through community collaboration and partnerships with other organizations. When not facilitating restoration, you can find her river running, tending to her garden, or cracking a wry joke.

Ray Williams, Mayberry Property Manager
Ray Williams has lived in Moab off and on since 1976 when he spent the summers working for his Uncle Mitch at Tag-A-Long Tours for many years running shuttles, providing kitchen packing support and many other tasks including as a jet boat captain for shuttles to Spanish Bottom. He moved here permanently in 1986 and recently restored his great grandfathers home on 100 N as his residence. He is the propagation center manager at Mayberry and the general repair man, logistics coordinator and all round troubleshooter. His time in Moab has also included driving for Sysco, working as the frozen food manager at Moonflower, and a season with Western Rivers. He can often be found at Mayberry enjoying the time away from people, and figuring out how to meet our most recent challenge.
When not at Mayberry Ray can be found doing all manner of fix-it things, or cooking amazing food.

Gavin Belfry, Project Manager, Native Plant Propagation
Gavin moved to Moab in the Summer of 2021, after graduating from University of Tennessee with a B.S. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, focusing his studies on Plant Community Ecology. His experience includes conducting forest health surveys across 5 watersheds within the West Elks Range of the Rockies, leading field crews for the USGS surveying restoration efforts across the Colorado Plateau, and studying fungal pathogens that infest common crops in East Tennessee. Gavin joined the Rim to Rim team early in 2023. He coordinates field crews working on restoration projects, manages native plant materials collection and propagation for future projects, and only occasionally bores his coworkers with too many plant facts. In his free time, you can find him lecturing his dog Moose about native plants, weaving baskets, and dangling his wife off of cliffs (at the end of a climbing rope).

Bryce Rogers, Project Coordinator & Restoration Specialist
Bryce is an experienced planning professional who manages Rim to Rim’s revegetation and restoration projects. In this role, she develops scopes of work, oversees project operations and budgets and manages partner collaboration.
Bryce most recently served as an associate planner for Grand County, where she reviewed and advised on commercial and residential developments and managed zone changes. Previously, she worked as the City of Moab’s assistant planner and floodplain administrator. Bryce has also held positions in numerous other fields, serving as a geophysicist, high-school math teacher and technical analyst for Shell Oil Company.
Bryce holds a B.S. in Earth and Environmental Science from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and earned a secondary mathematics teaching endorsement through the University of Utah.
When not working, Bryce can be found hunting mushrooms in the mountains or chasing her kids around the desert.

Sophia Fisher, Fire & Flood Outreach Specialist
Sophia is a public information professional and journalist dedicated to producing accessible, evocative information to mold a better world. At Rim to Rim, she empowers the Moab community to reduce fire and flood risk and nurture healthy creek corridors. Sophia previously worked as an award-winning reporter for the Moab Times-Independent and as a program developer for the nonprofit Science Moab, where she still serves as a board member. A University of Chicago graduate, Sophia traded academia for axes when she first moved to Utah in 2018 to work for a conservation corps. In her free time, she enjoys backpacking, river rafting, reading, and pointing out cool clouds in the big desert sky.

Jeanine Saia, Grant Administrator & Bookkeeper
Bio coming soon

Our Board
From its inception until now, Rim to Rim has intentionally operated with a small focused group of board members building the organizational foundation. With established groundwork, organizational success, and looking to the future, we are currently looking to expand our Board of Directors. If you are interested in serving in this capacity, please contact us.
Rusty Wheaton, Chair
Rhonda Gotway – Clyde
Delite Primus