Driveway sealcoating in Sunnyside.

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

Asphalt is rock held together by an oil binder, and that binder is what weather attacks first. Sun dries it out, water works at it, and a dried out binder lets the surface ravel apart grain by grain. Sealer takes that punishment so the binder underneath stays flexible longer.

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

A typical job runs clean, crack seal, coat, then cure. Cure time is the part owners underestimate. Vehicles stay off at least a day, longer if the pavement is shaded or the nights are cool, and turning a wheel while parked on a young coating will scuff it.

Sunnyside pavement specifically

Lodging and restaurant lots along the highway, plus residential drives on the streets above. Commercial pavement here works hardest in summer, which is exactly when it has to be sealed, so phasing keeps businesses open.

Heavy tree cover holds moisture on the surface long after the rest of the basin has dried, which slows curing and keeps organic debris on the asphalt. Sunnyside sits on the West Shore a couple of miles south of Tahoe City along Highway 89, a strip of lakefront lodging, restaurants, and residential streets climbing away from the water.

For a coating to be worth applying here, the surface underneath has to be sound and the cracks have to be closed first. We check both before quoting a seal.

Sunnyside sits at roughly 6,240 feet, and the pavement around it behaves accordingly. More on the area on our Sunnyside service area page. We work the same corridor through Tahoe City, Homewood, Tahoe Park, Dollar Point, and the pavement guides go deeper on the physics if you want it.

Questions