The year 2006 marked two milestones in the Columbia River Basin and the Pacific Northwest region's efforts to rebuild its once great salmon and steelhead runs—the 25th anniversary of the creation of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council and the 10th anniversary of an amendment to the Northwest Power Act that formalized scientific peer review of the council's Fish and Wildlife Program and its varied individual projects. The authors of this article served as peer reviewers in the last decade. Restoration efforts in the Columbia River constitute a massive long‐term attempt at fisheries and ecosystem restoration. In this article we examine some of the lessons we learned in reviewing the research, monitoring, and evaluation efforts of projects and their effects on advancing knowledge (i.e., adaptive management) in the Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program, one of the most ambitious and expensive long‐term ecological restoration programs in the United States.