Poll: Most hunker down to beat summer heat

The Arizona summer heat can be a drag. The heat hits long before Memorial Day and sticks around until Halloween, and there’s just no getting around that. Local residents find ways to live with it, but we wondered how you cope with 110-degree heat for weeks on end.

Our reader poll last week asked: “What is your favorite way to beat the summer heat?”

Local residents heavily favored home-based solutions. “Stay indoors and crank the A/C” was the runaway winner with nearly half (47%) of the 109 votes cast. The other stay-at-home solution finished second with 20% answering “Hit the pool.”

Those who favored getting away to beat the heat leaned toward the beach over the mountains. “Head for the beach” tallied 18% of the vote, while “Head for the mountains” followed with 15%.

Reader Steve Pless offered a different perspective on the InMaricopa Facebook page.

“If people would get out in the heat, they would get acclimated to it and it wouldn’t bother them so much,” he wrote. “I’m an AZ native, lived here 44 years and LOVE those summers.”

Jamie Morano shared a psychological coping mechanism.

“I just swear a lot,” Morano commented. “It makes me feel better about dealing with surface of the sun level heat. Yay.”

Visit InMaricopa’s homepage to vote in this week’s poll.