No lake-specific entry for Cleland Lake appears in the current Region 4 synopsis, so the general regional rules apply: trout/char daily quota 5, with no more than 1 rainbow or cutthroat over 50 cm. Confirm the current synopsis before you fish.

The lake covers 23.5 hectares and drops to a genuinely deep hole for its size: 31.7 metres at the deepest point, 11.4 metres on average, with an 8.4-metre Secchi reading and a slightly alkaline surface pH of 8.8. Those numbers come from the 1992 provincial lake survey ("A Fisheries Investigation of Cleland Lake"), the only bathymetric work on record for the lake. A lake this deep for a 23.5-hectare footprint stratifies hard through summer, which is the single biggest thing to plan around on the water.

For an angler weighing the drive, the release record is the fishing report. The Freshwater Fisheries Society of BC and its FIDQ predecessor have logged 78 releases of rainbow trout into Cleland Lake since 1957, roughly 389,000 fish in total, and the lake has never gone more than a year or two without a plant.

The program has shifted strain and life stage several times over that history. Early plants were Beaver- and Fraser Valley-strain fry and fingerlings; from 1985 to 2011 the lake carried Gerrard Creek and Gerrard-strain yearlings alongside Blackwater fish, a strain drawn from Kootenay Lake's famous giant rainbow run. Since 2012 the program has settled on Blackwater and, for the last two years, Pennask-strain yearlings: 2,500 fish in 2025 and again in 2026, each released at 5-6 grams. That is a true put-grow model, small yearlings dropped each spring to grow on the lake's own forage rather than catchables stocked at a fishable size.

The depth is the read. In spring and fall, when the whole water column is cool, work the shoals and shallower shelf with a chironomid under an indicator or a balanced leech retrieve, the standard small-lake stillwater approach. Once the lake stratifies through summer, the fish drop with the thermocline; a full-sink line and a Woolly Bugger or leech pattern worked deep along the drop-offs, or a trolled setup counted down to the cool water, will find fish that the shoal water has given up for the season. An evening rise over calm water is worth a searching dry like an Adams.

Cleland Lake sits west of Brisco, northwest of Invermere, in the upper Columbia valley. No confirmed road, launch or parking detail is on record for this specific lake; treat it as a regulation-and-access check before committing a day; the map shows where it sits in the Columbia drainage.