No lake survey, area figure or bathymetric data is on record for Pickering Lake. It is catalogued in the provincial lake gazetteer as a Bull River watershed water (waterbodyIdentifier 00145BULL, watershed code 349-337300), which ties its outflow to the Bull River system, though the exact outflow creek is not separately named in the data on file.

For an angler judging whether to make the stop, the release record is the fishing report. Provincial hatchery data logs 91 releases between 1952 and 2026, totalling 306,292 fish: 271,431 brook trout over 77 releases and 34,861 rainbow trout over 14 releases.

The program has changed character twice. The earliest record, 1952 to 1957, is rainbow trout fry and fingerlings from the Pennask and Beaver hatchery stocks. From 1959 the lake switched to brook trout, and by 1972 the program had settled on Aylmer-strain fish, the strain still going in every spring: a steady 3,000 fingerlings a year, most recently on 2026-04-10. A secondary Fraser Valley-strain rainbow trout fall-catchable program ran alongside it from 2008 to 2014, adding larger, close-to-legal-size fish most autumns, but no rainbow trout release has been recorded since 2014, so today's fishery is effectively single-species: brook trout, one cohort of fresh fingerlings arriving each spring on top of the last two or three years' holdovers.

With no confirmed depth or shoreline structure on record, treat Pickering Lake as a standard small East Kootenay stillwater until it is checked against local reports: work a chironomid under an indicator or a small leech over the shoals and flats, and switch to a slow-fished woolly bugger on an intermediate line as a searching pattern once the surface warms. Because the fingerling plant runs most springs, expect a mix of the newest brook trout alongside holdovers from the last two or three years' releases rather than a single year class.

No confirmed boat launch, parking area or shoreline access point has been found for Pickering Lake. It sits in the Bull River watershed of the East Kootenay; confirm the access route, any private-land sections, and current Region 4 rules locally before committing a day to it.