A pocket-sized stillwater on the south side of Invermere, topped up every spring with 500 catchable rainbow trout. It spent three decades as a brook trout nursery before the province switched to an annual put-and-take rainbow program in 2000.

No water-specific exception is listed for Dorothy Lake in the Region 4 synopsis, so the regional default applies: trout/char daily quota 5, no more than one rainbow or cutthroat over 50 cm, no more than one bull trout. Confirm the current rules before you fish.

Dorothy Lake is a small stillwater on the south side of Invermere, in the Columbia River watershed. The province's fisheries inventory surveyed it at just 1.53 hectares in May 1974, with a maximum depth of 5.8 m, a mean depth of 2.4 m and water clear enough to see a secchi disk at 3.7 m. Alkaline, productive water (surface pH 8.5) at this size and depth behaves like a farm pond more than a lake: there is no deep, unproductive middle to skip past, and wind can turn over the whole water column in an afternoon.

The stocking record is the closest thing this lake has to a fishing report, and it tells two different stories. From 1969 to 1999 the province ran Dorothy as a brook trout nursery, dropping roughly 2,000 wild-origin Aylmer-strain fingerlings most years. In 2000 that program stopped and switched to catchable-size rainbow trout; since 2009 it has settled into a steady annual plant of 500 Fraser Valley-strain rainbow, stocked as spring catchables averaging around 225 g. Whether any brook trout persist from the earlier program is unconfirmed; treat the current fishery as a rainbow-trout put-and-take pond.

Fished as a small stillwater, the same approach that works on comparably sized East Kootenay ponds applies here: a chironomid pupa under an indicator worked slow near bottom, or a small leech pattern like a Woolly Bugger or Balanced Leech fished on a slow retrieve, covers most of the productive water. An Adams or other general attractor dry is worth a look during any surface activity, though no water-specific hatch record exists for Dorothy Lake to confirm timing.

No public access details are confirmed for Dorothy Lake, so treat it as a regulation-and-access check before committing a day to it. At under 2 hectares it is small enough to cover entirely from shore, but confirm the approach road, parking and any private-land or seasonal restrictions locally before you go.

For an angler judging whether the fishing is worth the drive, the stocking record is the fishing report. Dorothy Lake has 47 recorded releases on file, 1969-2026: a brook trout fingerling program through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, then an annual rainbow trout plant every spring since. The most recent release was 500 Fraser Valley-strain rainbow trout on 2026-04-22, averaging about 227 g. The chart below breaks the full history down by year.