Revel in the Warmth & Kinship of Our Wild West Family
Meet the Van Berkums: David & Jane, Caroline, Derek & Meghan. The Van Berkum family has owned and operated the Rainbow Trout Ranch for over thirty years and we truly love what we do.
A little ranch family history: For three decades, Doug and Linda ran the ranch with their son David and his wife Jane. Theirs is a wonderful legacy which included three on-ranch and three often-on-ranch grandchildren. The opportunity Doug and Linda provided for their six grandchildren to grow up living and working in the dude ranch environment is impossible to measure.
In 2023 Doug and Linda chose to step back, leaving David and Jane to run the ranch with the help of family, and Tim & Ms. Meg Dyer, long-time dude-ranch colleagues who fit right in. Now that David and Jane’s adult kids have chosen a dude ranch career over life in the “real world,” the Dyers have returned to their own dude ranch home, and we now run it with our daughter Caroline, our son Derek and his wife Meghan – they met here at the ranch when she hired on as a housekeeper/waitstaff in 2020.
The Van Berkums love welcoming guests into their western home. As Doug always said “folks feel right at home here at the ranch. We have folks who come in as strangers and leave as friends planning their next year’s vacation with us together. It is one of the great pleasures of the dude ranch industry.”
Derek, Meghan, Caroline, Jane and David Van Berkum
The big photo at the top is from a few summers ago: David & Jane and their children, Mary-Anne, Caroline and Derek, as well as two nieces, Gaby and Hannah, centered around Doug and Linda. Our oldest niece Olivia, not pictured, worked here multiple years as well. Now, several years later, Doug & Linda are mainly at home in Iowa, Mary-Anne is married and living further north, and these nieces have all gone on to real-world careers. But we are still all about family here at the ranch, with the five of us here, two other nieces who come for the summers, and David’s sisters who come to help decorate, and who are responsible for all the wonderful flowers around the lodge, pool and barn areas. Rainbow Trout Ranch is truly a family dude ranch.
Dude ranching became a tradition for the Van Berkum family in the late eighties when David went to wrangle on a ranch in Montana and sister Rachel took a job helping in cabins on a Colorado ranch. Jane was a wrangler at that same Montana ranch as David, and once they became a team, they agreed that they wanted to be dude ranchers themselves. Doug and Linda visited them all and pretty soon, guest ranching was in their blood too.
A few years of searching for just the right place led them to the Rainbow Trout Lodge in southern Colorado, long famous for the amazing lodge, superb fishing and spectacular scenery in the beautiful Rio Grande National Forest. They changed the name to the Rainbow Trout Ranch, bringing the focus onto both the exceptional fishing and the fabulous riding, and the rest is a wonderful, rich history of western vacations and experiences.
When you call or email, you will most likely get Caroline, Meghan or Jane, and we will be so happy to help you plan your Rainbow Trout Ranch vacation. Jane has always said that if she didn’t live the lifestyle anyway, she would certainly take her family on a dude ranch vacation. It is a truly multi-generational outdoor adventure family vacation and it has been wonderful to welcome back guests each year as well as welcome new folks. And our goal for everyone, guests and staff, is to “disconnect to reconnect…”
Come share this magic part of Colorado with us. It is spectacular and we look forward to welcoming you!
