Pool installation for Black Mountain properties
Black Mountain sits at 2,405 feet, fifteen miles east of Asheville, and it has genuinely good pool ground in it. We install all four shell types here, precast, fiberglass, gunite and container, which matters in a town where the lots vary as much as these do.
I-40 runs south of downtown at exits 64 and 65, and US 70, State Street, runs through the middle of it. The Swannanoa River flows east to west through town, rising only three miles east at Swannanoa Gap, so what you are standing in down in the middle of town is a river valley that has not had far to widen out.
Flat ground beside the river is the easy ground: comparatively level, straightforward to dig, and reachable by a truck and a crane. On a lot like that the money goes into the pool and what surrounds it instead of into moving dirt.
Then the land goes up, and it goes up fast. Black Mountain sits at the southern end of the Black Mountain range, with Mount Mitchell behind it, the highest point east of the Mississippi at 6,684 feet. The Seven Sisters are visible from most of town, the Swannanoa Mountains to the south top 4,000 feet, and Montreat lies up a cove to the north. Residential ground running up into all of that is steep, often narrow, and reached by roads laid out around the mountain instead of through it.
Two Black Mountain addresses can be five minutes and four hundred feet of elevation apart, and they are not the same project.
The coves, and what they do to a pool build
Cove lots are where a Black Mountain build gets difficult, because grade, a narrow road and shallow rock arrive together with nowhere obvious for a crane to stand.
Grade means the pool has to be cut into the hill and held, or built up and carried. Access matters because the road up is narrow and the trees over it are old. And rock sits shallower on ground that has been shedding soil downhill for a long time than it does down on the flat.
None of the three is a reason to stop. All three are costs, and the honest version of a quote around here prices them before the dig instead of during it. Whether rock is priced up front is a fair question to put to every quote you are comparing, and the answers vary more than the prices do.
The compensation for all of it is the view. A pool cut into a cove lot with the ground falling away below it is the one setting where a vanishing edge is not an affectation. Water runs over the edge with the mountain behind it, and that design only really works on ground shaped like this.
