Just a suggestion: Maybe the cave was an upland hunting area that was returned to seasonally for big game. The tool cache could have been left intentionally so that it would be accessible year after year (would you really want to haul all that stuff down the mountain?) It would have made for a nice hunting encampment as well as a tool shed for a highly mobile group.
Not a bad speculation. And the altitude might enable them to look down on where the game was...
I found a site in Spanish from the Universitad de Laredo. Thank you Google translate! Anyway, it specified that there were alpine glaciers in the higher peaks, over 12K feet. Like Glacier National Park is today.
So 9K might have had snow, but not under the ice.