B-metro - The magazine of metro Birmingham living

This month’s one on one conversation puts fashion and hospitality together in a most interesting way.

With a tremendous coaching pedigree and feel for the game, Coach Jerod Haase has UAB’s basketball team gliding toward a potential 20-win season

The home sat on the market for some time before Hagefstration finally had a vision for its restoration. He hoped that the open floor plan, mid-century style, high ceilings, and vast wall space might give him the opportunity to display his own set of trophies: his photography collection.

“If you would have told me seven years ago that I’d either be president or climbing Mount Everest, I would have picked president.” Kent Stewart is serious about that. In 2006, Stewart and his wife, Julie, decided to go to Africa and climb Mount Kilimanjaro, just “for something interesting to do,” Stewart says.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” says Scott Thigpen. “I am not a badass.”

That’s debatable. On June 14, 2013, Thigpen set off on the Tour Divide, a cycling race that follows the Great Divide Trail. The trail—the world’s longest off-pavement cycling route—spans 2,745 miles, from Banff, Alberta, in Canada, to Antelope Wells, N.M.

The vast openness of the African savannah is the image that Jason McCracken carried home from his first trip to the continent last year. That openness, defined by the starlit, broad sky at night—a Milky Way brilliantly visible in a way McCracken had never seen before—remains with him and calls him to return.

Goshorn sits. The thin shell of his kayak holds his legs snugly together as he paddles with a cool control, one hand over the other. Inches above the waterline, and a mile below the Earth’s surface, he traces the path of the powerful Colorado River.

“The thing is, you’re going to be scared. You’re going to be scared in the weeks before. You’re going to think about it at night. You’ll get more scared as you get closer, and the plane ride up is the worst thing. You’ll get over to the open door of the airplane, and everything in you will be telling you not to jump.” He paused there, for dramatic effect, I think, and then he looked at me. “My advice is to jump anyway.”