The Pacific coastal route proposes that people moved south from Beringia not through the interior but along the Pacific coast of North America, traveling by boat along the coastlines of Alaska, British Columbia, and eventually reaching unglaciated areas of the North American coast where they could establish themselves and eventually move inland.

The coastal route has the advantage of not requiring passage through the potentially inhospitable ice-free corridor, and it has the support of some archaeological and genetic evidence suggesting that coastal migration occurred.

The disadvantage of the coastal route hypothesis is that much of the relevant coastline from the Last Glacial Maximum period is now underwater — the sea level rise of 120 to 130 meters since the Last Glacial Maximum has submerged the coastal environments that would have supported early coastal migrants.

Direct archaeological evidence for coastal migration is therefore extremely difficult to find, not because it did not happen but because the evidence is largely inaccessible.