What The Mountains Still Hold

The Tatshenshini-Alsek region is not done with its revelations.

The glaciers are continuing to retreat.

The ice patches at high altitude — the permanent or semi-permanent snow that accumulates at passes and overlooks where ancient hunters watched for game — are melting year by year.

The material preserved in this ice is being released on a schedule that no one controls and that is accelerating as the climate warms.

Archaeological monitoring programs in Alaska and the Yukon have been finding organic material from these retreating ice patches for more than two decades — atlatl darts, arrows, wooden foreshafts, birchbark containers, leather scraps, the desiccated remains of hunted animals — ranging in age from a few hundred to several thousand years.