On this overcast afternoon in Baltimore, Md., Nik Wallenda, self-proclaimed king of the high wire, is presiding over his kingdom below.
Wallenda lives for wire-walking. The 33-year-old has done it nearly his entire life. And yet, on a wire 30 metres above the city’s Inner Harbour with no safety net or harness, he’s one misstep away from serious trouble.
In the middle of the 90-metre wire, Wallenda confidently drops down on one knee and waves to the crowd of about 10,000, a routine move for the showman. He has walked in worse weather and played for much larger crowds.
But about eight paces from the end of the wire, he stumbles. The crowd gasps. One woman lets out an alarmed shriek.
Channeling instinct, Wallenda keeps his front knee bent and curls his back foot around the wire, leaving him in a forward crouch. He takes a couple of deep breaths without moving, holding his balance pole still. “You’ve got it! You’ve got it,” a woman yells encouragingly from the crowd.
After a few more seconds, the funambulist stands up and walks toward safety at the wire’s end. He pumps his fist triumphantly: crisis averted.
Later that month, when asked about the Baltimore stumble, Wallenda lets out a yawn and says he just lost focus for a moment. That sort of thing just “comes with the job.
“My friend was up in the basket and I started talking to him, and it was just enough of a distraction. The wire kind of moved a little bit and I just misstepped. It’s why I’ve trained for so long: you stay on the wire. Your heart jumps up into your throat and two seconds later, you’re fine.”
Wallenda can’t afford to make a similar stumble this Friday during his highest-profile act yet: walking 550 metres across Niagara Falls, on a wire 60 metres above the gorge.
“This is unique because it’s the longest unsupported or unstabilized cable that anyone’s put up in the history of wire-walking,” Wallenda says.
And if the much-publicized stunt is a success, he’ll also be the first person to cross right over the falls.
A number of daredevils have walked across the gorge further downstream, but no one has gone directly above the falls themselves. It has been more than 100 years since anyone has even attempted a crossing.
Wallenda, from Sarasota, Fla., waged a two-year, cross-border bureaucratic battle to win the right to try.
The last holdout was Canada’s Niagara Parks Commission, which initially rejected his request citing a ban on stunting.
Wallenda marshalled arguments on all fronts. The blockbuster event would be an economic boon to the region, bringing an estimated $120 million in tourist dollars, as he demonstrated in his own specially commissioned report. And, with the local Parks Commission, he used semantics: he is not a stuntman but a highly-trained performance artist with the ability to complete the daring feat.
He won.
But now there’s yet another hitch: less than a week before the big day, the logistics are still coming together, and it’s unclear how the wire will be stretched across the Niagara River.
Still, if anyone can make it happen, it’s Wallenda, who comes from a long line of renowned circus performers.
At 6 years of age, with his parents Terry and Delilah Troffer wire-walking in Buffalo, N.Y., young Nik first laid eyes on Niagara Falls and thought “how cool it would be” to be the first person to walk over them.
It’s been his dream ever since.
“I’ve had a vision for my name since I was very young, that I was going to take it to the top of my industry,” he says. “I’ve been fulfilling that goal ever since.”
At around 10 p.m. on Friday in Niagara Falls, N.Y., Wallenda will step onto the wire. He will take his time with the walk, soaking up the spectacle, and if all goes as planned, he’ll reach the Canadian side in about 45 minutes.
As he crosses, Wallenda must keep his centre of balance, located near his belly button, directly above the wire. He will use a 12-metre aluminum balance pole that weighs 16 kilograms, with a brace strapped around his neck to help support its weight.
The pole slows down his movements, giving him time to counterbalance and remain centred, says his uncle and chief engineer, Mike Troffer. He will continually readjust as his centre of balance moves.
“Wire-walking is generally about keeping your whole body straight and stiff,” Wallenda says. “Only the pole and your legs will move.”
The other part keeping him above the falls is the steel wire, 5 centimetres in diameter. There’s a small wire rope at its core, with six twisted strands of steel — each strand consisting of 49 wires — around that centre.
The wire comes from Wirerope Works in Williamsport, Penn. Wallenda ordered 1,130 metres of it with one special request: no grease inside the rope, which would make it slippery.
Wallenda expects part of the wire to be wet from the mist rising from the falls. But he uses the same technique whatever the condition of the wire.
“I like to walk where I slide my feet, I grab the wire with my toes, so I touch my toes to the wire and slide,” he says. “So that if the wire is moving, I’m sliding along. Even if it moves this way my foot’s still on it, and if it moves that way my foot’s still on it.”
His custom-made boots help. Part moccasin, part ballet shoe, they are handcrafted by his mother. Delilah Troffer taught herself to make these shoes and has been doing so for her immediate family for the past two decades. The upper part of the boot is made from finished cowhide, while the sole is suede. That thin layer of suede on the sole allows Wallenda to feel the wire better.
“I prefer elk skin on the soles because it roughs up easier, but that’s hard to find in Florida,” Delilah says. The roughing up makes the sole stick a little to the wire, especially if the wire is wet.
Wallenda has worn in his most recent pair — the pair he’ll use for the falls crossing — while practising at the Seneca Casino in Niagara Falls, N.Y., which he did for 11 days straight last month.
In the falls crossing, he will start out walking down a decline of 5 to 6 degrees, “which is manageable for a long walk like this,” says Uncle Mike. Wallenda will slowly walk downhill 275 metres to the midpoint, which will be 11 metres lower than where he started from, and then walk up an incline to the finish.
The expected hundreds of thousands spectators at Niagara Falls and millions more watching Wallenda on television will, of course, be hanging on his every step.
But Mercury Morgan, a stuntman who describes himself as Wallenda’s longtime friend, stunt co-ordinator and “spiritual brother,” says a wire walk in front of millions of viewers is, in some ways, the same as a walk on your own.
“Once you take two steps out there, nobody exists. There’s nobody going to help you.”
Some dangers are unique to the falls. Wallenda says his biggest nature-related worry is the wind.
If there’s a weather system in the region, there’s a higher chance of gusty winds, says Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips. And even if there isn’t, the falls’ topography can still lead to variable wind patterns.
“There may be some funneling,” says Phillips. “The topography might be such that it might constrict a bit of flow, and that would of course speed winds up. The land can slow them down but then create these little vortices, or turbulence, that could make the wind quite variable.”
Wallenda should hope for a high-pressure system, which would mean a steady wind or none at all, he continues.
Another challenge emerged late last month: a pair of peregrine falcons nesting nearby that could attack Wallenda in a bid to protect their young and their airspace.
The Canadian Peregrine Foundation said last month it had alerted the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources about the dangers of a possible falcon attack and suggested the crossing be put off until September.
But Wallenda wasn’t about to postpone after all his preparation.
Wire-walking is physically taxing, especially if the walk is to last 45 minutes, and Wallenda needs to be in top physical condition. Normally he works out five times a week, with two hours of weight training plus an hour or so of cardio,
But above all, Wallenda says, a walk is “all mental.”
Wallenda’s walk across the falls is as much about the family legacy as it is about himself.
Several generations ago, the Wallendas were a travelling circus troupe in Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. They performed in city squares throughout Europe as far back as the 1780s and were known for their flying trapeze act.
It was Nik’s great-grandfather, Karl Wallenda, who learned wire-walking in the early 1920s. He later developed his own act featuring, among others, his brother Josef and his future wife, Helen Kreis.
The Wallendas brought their act to North America in 1928, performing at Madison Square Garden without a net and reportedly earning a 15-minute standing ovation.
As the Flying Wallendas, they performed with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus during much of the 1930s and 1940s.
The Wallendas became known for a signature move first performed in 1948: the seven-person chair pyramid, featuring three levels of wire walkers. It involved four men on a wire yoked together in pairs by shoulder bars. On top of them stood two more men yoked together. The third level was a woman sitting, then standing, on a chair.
In January 1962 in Detroit, the pyramid collapsed, leaving two members of the troupe dead and a third — Karl’s son Mario — paralyzed from the waist down. A year later, Karl’s sister-in-law Rietta died in a fall.
Karl Wallenda’s career continued: he walked between buildings and across stadiums. In 1970, he walked 200 metres across Georgia’s Tallulah Gorge before 30,000 spectators.
During a March 1978 walk between two hotel towers in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Karl was halfway across the wire before it started to sway and wobble. He tried to sit down on the wire and grab it, but fell to his death at the age of 73.
The family maintains that the rigging wasn’t stabilized properly. But Nik, who has watched and rewatched a video of the fall, says his great-grandfather wasn’t in good physical shape leading up to the walk.
“We’ve learned there’s got to be certain protocols, and if you don’t meet them you shouldn’t be on the wire,” he says.
Nik often names Karl as his main inspiration and has cast himself as the heir to his great-grandfather’s legacy. Last June, Nik and his mother completed the Puerto Rico walk that killed the family patriarch. Wallenda kneeled in the spot where Karl fell and blew a kiss in tribute to his hero.
“That was a special moment for us,” his mother says. “It proved to the world the Wallenda family’s resiliency.”
It was Delilah Troffer who first began teaching Nik how to walk the wire when he was 2, holding his hand as he balanced back and forth on wires suspended in the backyard at the family’s Sarasota property.
Nik was performing by age 13, and settled on a career as a performer when he was 19. The following year, 1999, he proposed to his wife, Erendira, on a high wire — she, too, is a performer and the member of a circus family — at the end of a sold-out show in Montreal.
They got married a week later, and often perform together.
The Flying Wallendas was a family business, and Nik Wallenda’s operation is no different. Father Terry, who performed on the wire for 36 years before retiring in 2001, is now part of his son’s team. Wallenda’s inner circle comprises other daredevil friends he has performed with over the years.
“They keep me grounded, and they’re kind of my core group,” he says. “You can’t trust a lot of people in business, and I can trust all of these guys.”
Erendira and their three children are often close by. Yanni, 14, Amadeus, 11 and Evita, 9, usually accompany their parents to gigs, as Nik did his. The three were hanging around when their father was rehearsing in Niagara Falls, N.Y. last month, having flown up from Florida earlier than scheduled at their father’s urging.
“I was gone from them for six days this week and it’s the longest I’ve been away from them in nine years,” Nik says.
“This is our life and we don’t think of it as being strange or different,” Erendira says. “When they were about two weeks old, they were strapped in their strollers and they watched their daddy walk the wire. So this is normal to them.”
Amadeus started the day outside the Seneca Casino by balancing on the wire with his father’s guidance.
This weekend, the Wallendas are opening a show in Branson, Missouri — a welcome distraction from the hoopla, Nik says.
But those around him say wherever he is, his mind is never far from the wire.
“Whenever we’re someplace unique or different,” says Erendira, “he’s always looking around — ‘Oh, I could string a wire from here to there and walk there.’ ”
In late March, Wallenda’s uncle/engineer Mike contacted Idaho-based engineer Peter Catchpole for help. Troffer, who had worked with cables for 40 years in the United States Navy, knew that extending a wire across the falls would be a major engineering challenge.
Catchpole, a Niagara-area native who studied at Queen’s University, got experience with cable work while helping set up hydro wires in the mountains of British Columbia. He quickly drafted a schedule one Sunday afternoon on an Excel spreadsheet. The work would begin on May 1.
That day, just six weeks shy of the spectacle, the rigging crew installed four rods on each side of the falls, making sure to drill the holes deep enough that the rods were embedded in solid rock.
“When we got them down to the rock, we don’t want them grabbing the same boulder,” Catchpole says. “So deep down, the rods are far apart.”
The rods, which emerge from Table Rock on the Canadian side and Terrapin Point on the American, were attached to wires which were in turn attached to a series of metal plates, finishing the anchoring system for Wallenda’s high wire, which will be secured to those plates on both sides of the river.
At 8 a.m. on Monday, cranes and all the other nuts and bolts will be assembled at Table Rock, with Terrapin Point following the next day. The cranes will lift the wire Wallenda crosses to the appropriate height.
Once the Maid of the Mist tour boat finishes for the day on June 12, some time around 6 p.m., the engineers will begin what Uncle Mike calls the “organized chaos” of getting the wire across the Niagara Gorge. The entire operation will cost about $800,000.
The finely coordinated dance will start at Table Rock, where a giant pulling winch on a tractor trailer will be hooked up to the high wire’s anchoring system. A 500-metre, lightweight, yellow polypropylene rope, spooled around a giant drum, will be attached to the anchor.
If all goes according to plan, a helicopter will hover over Table Rock, drop down a cable, and pick up the other end of the yellow rope. Then the chopper will rise straight up until the rope is completely unspooled, and fly over to the giant traction winch on Terrapin Point on the American side, depositing the rope there. The actual high wire is much too heavy for a helicopter to pull across the gorge, hence the plan using rope and winches.
(The plan was still uncertain on Saturday, however, because Wallenda’s people hadn’t found a helicopter with all the necessary Canadian and American permissions to do the job.)
On the American side, the rigging crew will take the yellow rope, feed it through a pulley, and then attach it to the steel high wire.
The winch on the Canadian side will pull the yellow rope along with the steel wire across the gorge, like a fisherman reeling in his line.
The tension will need to be slowly increased as the yellow rope gives way to the heavy steel wire. That is, it will require more tension the heavier the line gets as it crosses the river.
As the wire is being pulled across the gorge, the rigging crew on the U.S. side will clamp on a weighted pendulum every 45 metres, altenating between 3-metre and 6-metre long pendulums. Each pendulum will have a 23- to 36-kilogram weight on the bottom.
The pendulums will keep the wire from twisting, making the crossing safer for Wallenda.
“I’m spending my final days triple-checking all my calculations so on Tuesday night, when the wire is up, I don’t have to live in hiding in Dubai or something,” Catchpole says laughing.
Since the wire is new, it will expand in what is known as construction stretch. On the practice wire at the casino, which was half the length of the wire that will hang over the falls, it stretched 2.5 metres. Construction stretch is difficult to calculate.
But the wire can be adjusted because the cranes can lift or drop it and the entire crane can move forward or backward.
“The length will be imperfect,” Catchpole says, “so I just need to get it close enough so that I can manipulate it with the cranes.”
“This wire will give you a little kick every once in a while because it’s not stabilized,” Wallenda says. “It keeps you on your toes, for sure.”
Wallenda won the support of officials without committing to wearing any sort of safety harness. But he says the ABC network, which will broadcast the feat live — and pay him for the privilege — is insisting he wear a tether, which he’s never done before.
ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider didn’t specifically confirm that Wallenda has to wear a tether but said “appropriate safety precautions” will be taken and have been discussed from the beginning.
He added that the safeguards won’t diminish the thrill of the event but “will perhaps give parents who want to watch it with their kids a little comfort.
“We’re talking about live television here. I think that the worry would be self-evident. If . . . somebody’s actual life has to be on the line for people to be interested, they may need to find something else to watch.”
For his part, Wallenda says that if he’s forced into wearing a harness, he wants it to be known that wasn’t his choice.
“I’ve told ABC . . . if I have to wear a harness, they’re going to have to announce that they made me; they’ve got to show it in the special.”
He notes that he always wears a safety belt. It is not attached to the wire, but if he gets into trouble he can lower his body and hook the belt into the wire.
Wallenda’s career is based on defying death. But the only time he hesitates during a 45-minute interview is when asked if he thinks about that possibility.
“Not really,” replies the self-described born-again Christian. “You can go anywhere you want with your mind, if you allow it to. I could freak myself out to the point where I wouldn’t get on that wire . . . ”
Wallenda adds that he’s never psyched himself out of doing a walk, even in difficult weather conditions.
“If I let my mind go crazy then I wouldn’t sleep for the next month, and I’d be miserable.”
Old friend Mercury Morgan says death always walks the wire with Wallenda. “People think it can’t possibly be that dangerous, that there must be some trick. In fact, it really is just about as dangerous as you can possibly imagine it to be.”
Clearly, Wallenda and his career thrive on that danger. And he’s hoping the Niagara Falls crossing will bring more engagements all over the world.
His own personal Holy Grail: crossing the Grand Canyon, a project already in the works.
1859
The year the Great Blondin (real name Jean-FranÇois Gravelet) became the first person to cross Niagara Falls by tightrope.
13 stories
Nik Wallenda is the Guinness World Record holder for longest and highest distance on a high wire while riding a bicycle.
44.63
seconds
The fastest tightrope walk over 100 metres was achieved by Aisikaier Wubulikasimu at Fuding City, China, in October 2009.
$1.2 million
Cost of the Niagara Falls tightrope crossing as estimated by Nik Wallenda.
$50,000
Wallenda’s fundraising goal on the website Indiegogo.
$7,069
Amount he’d raised as of Saturday afternoon.
8 tonnes
Weight of the wire Wallenda will cross over Niagara Falls
