LAUREN GILGER: It is the dog days of summer here in the Valley of the Sun. The extreme heat warnings are officially here. You can’t really go outside, and it seems like all of your friends are on the beach somewhere else.
So, how do we survive the summer of 2026? Well, you’re in luck, because we have got an expert here to tell us, or at least give us his take. Craig Outhier is the editor of Phoenix magazine, and he is in studio now to tell us more, where it is thankfully air-conditioned.
CRAIG OUTHIER: Good morning. ... Thanks for having me. Yeah, I have to say, if I had a dollar for every time I’d written a feature story in the magazine about how to stay cool in the summer, I mean, yes, I mean, I’d a few dollars, let’s put it that way. [LAUGHS]
LAUREN GILGER: A few dollars for sure. [LAUGHS] I want to ask you about that to begin with, right? Like you you edit this kind of magazine that a lot of magazines in in other parts of the country right now would be talking about, you know, Fourth of July backyard barbecues —
CRAIG OUTHIER: It's high season.
LAUREN GILGER: ... and parties and things like that, but we definitely have to think about this a little differently here.
CRAIG OUTHIER: Not our high season by any means.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. How do you think about it as an editor?
CRAIG OUTHIER: I do kind of go to the old clichés, the, you know, as the kids say, the tropes. Underground places are great. So you know, underground bars — mean these are the things I put in the magazine, like the Rokerij on 16th Street, Richardson’s, the old, you know, Southwestern restaurant. He expanded and there’s a basement bar that’s so wonderful. It’s so dark. It’s so well — it’s a dungeon.
LAUREN GILGER: It’s cool down there, yeah.
CRAIG OUTHIER: But dungeons are well insulated and dark, which in Phoenix in the summer, dungeons are amazing. They get a bad rap ... Yhose are the kinds of things I think about.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. So, yeah, you have to you have to reframe things a little bit there. What do you do with yourself during the summer? How do you how do you make it through?
CRAIG OUTHIER: I try to find a zen kind of balance between um air conditioning, obviously, then a little bit of outdoor, you know, finding those those discrete moments where you can enjoy the outdoors. Maybe there’s a monsoon or just a, you know, crazy sirocco that comes in off the desert. That was a Donald Fagen line. Steely Dan played, you know, that what they call it back then, Cricket Pavilion, Desert Sky, Blockbuster ... what they call it, Ashley HomeStore Superstore Pavilion, whatever it is. Yeah, they were playing in July. It was like, well, that’s going to be hellish, but this beautiful sirocco came in off the desert. So those are little moments I try to find, and then of course, self-medication.
LAUREN GILGER: [LAUGHS] Cocktails?
CRAIG OUTHIER: Cocktails. And I do a cocktail camp every Sunday. ... Yes, exactly. It’s a great way to deal. I don’t, you know, wouldn’t recommend being drunk the whole summer. That’s not productive. That has, that’s going to have byproducts that you don’t want.
LAUREN GILGER: Yes.
CRAIG OUTHIER: But, you know, having a cocktail on a Sunday afternoon, it’s just a productively irresponsible. Yes. And I think that’s kind of the thing you got to look at. Just find your zen. Balance the whole deal.
LAUREN GILGER: What do you mean by a cocktail camp? You you you come up with a new cocktail?
CRAIG OUTHIER: The magazine partners with a series of restaurants and bars, and then every Sunday throughout the summer, I host it. It’s, you know, three or four cocktails at some of the best restaurants and cocktail programs in the Valley. We, you know, partner with them. And that’s the way I spend my Sundays as a father of two and a husband. ...
LAUREN GILGER: [LAUGHS] I’m sure your family appreciates that. But, but a lot of fun, I’m sure. OK. Underground bars, you’ve got cocktails. What about when you can go outside? Like you can go outside in the summer here, maybe in the morning or in the evenings, or if you’re wet, right? If you’re in some body of water.
CRAIG OUTHIER: Thank you for bringing that up. You know, going back to the old saws, the clichés, like I had always read about the Salt River, and I had done the tubing thing on the weekends, right? Everyone has. It’s pretty gross.
Your producer, Amy Silverman, who’s also our wonderful columnist at the magazine, says she will never step foot in that thing, and I get it. But that is the weekend Salt River. The weekday Salt River is much cleaner. It’s a self-cleaning, moving body of water. So when you go during the week, especially in the summer, in the dead of summer, there’s not that many people out there at all.
And I have a buddy who has a, you know, a couple of stand-up paddleboard rigs. ... And he invited me out last year, and I had never gone in 20 years in the Valley, 25 years. I had never gone out there and done the paddleboard. I mean, there is an immediate like 20-degree drop for water.
LAUREN GILGER: Oh, yeah. Being on the water, yeah.
CRAIG OUTHIER: It’s the best evaporative, natural evaporative cooling machine in the valley. And I’m talking, you know, not Tempe Town Lake. I think that you kind of lose some of it there. But the Salt River, the same, you know, up there in on halfway to Payson.
And it’s so lovely, and as Mark was saying, there’s there’s horses. Yeah. And you know, you almost always see them if you go late in the day, which is when you should probably do it, when the sun’s going down, that’s when you really can enjoy the the coolness. And once you — once that direct heat or sunlight is off of you, it really is gorgeous. And that’s the one time in the last 25 years since I’ve been here where I’m actually in the Valley, what technically is the Valley, and didn’t feel like I was there outdoors.
LAUREN GILGER: I mean, yeah, that’s a lovely thought. It’s a lovely thought. So, the city kind of empties out this time of year, Craig. I appreciate when that happens in some ways. First of all, the lack of traffic. It’s like easier to get into places you might want to go. Like are there some upsides you think to Phoenix in the summer?
CRAIG OUTHIER: That’s a great point, and that’s part of the zen, I think, is enjoying the lack of congestion. Driving here this morning, I, you know, was headed towards downtown for part of it, there was no traffic.
There is a a thankful kind of quality you can have there, right? Gratitude. I mean, if you’re in any major metropolitan area and driving somewhere at 8:30 in the morning, what’s the chances you don’t hit traffic? ...
So those are the things I think we tell ourselves. He’s kind of like comforting BS.
LAUREN GILGER: [LAUGHS] Makes us all feel better. But it’s like we’re the last people standing ... so you can appreciate this about yourself. .. OK. Last question for you in the last minute or so here, Craig. I wonder, you know, do we need to just like reframe the way we think about summers in Phoenix?
Like could we approach it more like people approach it on the East Coast in the winter, maybe? Like you’re not going to go out ... a lot out side in the winter in the East Coast where it’s freezing cold a lot of the time. But for some reason, we we think about it very differently. I think we get angry about it here in a different way.
CRAIG OUTHIER: Yeah, there is a seasonal affective disorder here, and I think that’s been proven. We did a — Jimmy Magahern, you know, longtime journalist who used to work for the New Times, writes for Phoenix magazine a lot. He did a piece on on summer seasonal affective disorder because we found that, you know, statistically, crime rates, violent crime, does spike per capita.
You know, maybe not total crime because, like you say, there’s fewer people here in August. But the people that are here are angry and violent. And I think that that is a problem.
But, you know, I think what we do is we look at it, like you say, like the East Coast does with their winters. What you do is you pray for an Indian summer on the East Coast, which means one of those nice long falls. Here, we just enjoy hopefully a pleasant spring that doesn’t get hot quick.
And you know, even though we had a really nasty March, we had a really nice April and May here.
LAUREN GILGER: Even June — not terrible.
CRAIG OUTHIER: Exactly. So we kind of just, you know, we took that. I think that gives us — doesn’t it give us fuel for the summer? ... As we hit as we hit 110? We’re like, well, this sucks, but that May was really nice.
LAUREN GILGER: At least there was that. All right. Phoenix magazine editor Craig Outhier, thank you so much, Craig. Appreciate it.
CRAIG OUTHIER: My pleasure.
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