The billion-dollar river restoration industry relies primarily on the perception that pre-disturbance rivers were free-flowing. Despite the importance of many dam removal projects in restoring anadromous fish runs, this talk emphasizes that not every dam is a bad dam. In particular, remote rivers with limited human influence are dominated by "natural dams," especially wood jams and beaver dams, which create patchy, discontinuous river systems. These patchy systems have much greater variation in habitat than purely free-flowing ones, which increases their resilience to disturbance and which also increases support for all life stages of critical species such as anadromous fish. This talk presents field research that describes the impacts of natural dams and then describes implications for river restoration when they are included in the pre-disturbance baseline.