Driveway sealcoating in Kings Beach.

What the work involves

Sealcoating a driveway means cleaning the surface, treating what needs treating, sealing the cracks, and rolling OverKote sealer over the top. It is the coating that takes the sun and the plow wear instead of your asphalt taking it.

Why it matters at this elevation

The point of sealing at this elevation is water. Every drop that soaks into asphalt is a candidate for freezing, and frozen water expands and breaks pavement from the inside. Sealer keeps most of that water on the surface where it can drain away, and it takes the plow and sun wear that would otherwise land on the asphalt itself.

Pavement in this range spends a long stretch under snow and then a long stretch cycling between melt and overnight refreeze. The refreeze does the damage. Water that ran into a crack at two in the afternoon is ice by nine at night, and ice takes up more room than the water did.

How the job runs

Prep is most of the labor. Sweeping and blowing the surface, cutting back whatever is growing at the edges, treating spots where oil has softened the asphalt, and closing the cracks. The sealer itself is the fast part, and it performs exactly as well as the surface it went onto.

Kings Beach pavement specifically

Kings Beach is the working town on the north shore. Commercial lots for restaurants, motels, and shops along the Highway 28 frontage, plus dense residential streets behind them. Lots that stay open through a Tahoe summer get phased so the businesses keep parking.

We handle both sides of Kings Beach work: commercial sealcoat-and-stripe packages timed around business hours, and the residential driveways in the blocks above the highway. Lake-effect snow hits the north shore hard, and commercial lots here get plowed constantly.

A coating on this pavement is protection against sun and water, not a repair. Where the surface has gone past protection, we say so rather than paint over it.

Kings Beach sits at roughly 6,240 feet, and the pavement around it behaves accordingly. More on the area on our Kings Beach service area page. We work the same corridor through Agate Bay, Alpine Meadows, Alpine Peaks, and the pavement guides go deeper on the physics if you want it.

Questions