Matt Cheramie

Matt Cheramie writes and edits Scottsdale.tips from Old Town, where he has lived for the last two years after sixteen in South Scottsdale. He grew up in Soda Springs, a small town in southeastern Idaho, moved to Arizona in 2006 to attend Arizona State University, where he studied art and photography, liked the place too much to leave, and has called Scottsdale home since 2008.

The site began in 2020 as Matt’s Guide to Scottsdale, a PDF he handed to friends flying in. People kept asking him for recommendations, and the recommendations kept needing context: why this patio and not that one, which month, how early to be on the trail. The PDF outgrew the format, and Scottsdale.tips is what it became: the places and an honest verdict on each, and beside them the whole history of the city, for anyone who wants to know how it got this way.

By day he works in marketing for a local consumer products brand. The rest of the week looks like the site: several nights out in Old Town’s restaurants, bars and clubs, mornings on Camelback’s Cholla Trail (the best trail on the mountain, in his view) or out at Tom’s Thumb, rounds at the Vista del Camino disc golf course, camping trips beyond the city line, coffee at Cartel and a regular’s stool at the Goodwood Tavern. Ask him when to come and he will say February or March. He is a father of five and a long-time dog owner: Jericho, a Rhodesian Ridgeback and pit bull mix who believed he was a lapdog, was the trail companion of past years, and Eva, his partner Kelly’s eleven-year-old, nine-pound Italian Greyhound, now gets walked around Scottsdale instead.

Every guide follows that life. The restaurant guides follow meals paid for at retail, the trailhead guides follow drives out before sunrise, and the gear verdicts follow a summer on a dashboard. The history chapters, the lexicon, the people profiles and the ledger of what the city cost are built from the city’s own records, its newspapers and its oral histories: the Scottsdale Public Library’s local history collection, the Scottsdale Historical Society, the newspaper archives, the city council’s minutes and records, and conversations with people who were there, with the sources on the page. Nothing on the site is sponsored, no business has paid for its coverage, and the opinions, including the unflattering ones, are his. Where a page is out of date, the “facts checked” stamp at its foot says how stale it might be, and corrections are folded into the next verification pass.