Why was he there?

Why was a man with coastal dietary connections and a hat of coastal style traveling through one of the most challenging alpine landscapes in North America?

The honest answer is that we don’t know, and cannot know with certainty from the evidence available.

What we can do is examine what is known about the landscape, the routes, and the patterns of travel and trade in the region during the period when Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi lived, and consider what contexts might explain his presence in the ice.

The Tatshenshini-Alsek region has been a place of human movement for a very long time.