2013
Wallenda Makes Grand Canyon Crossing On High Wire
On this day in 2013, 34-year-old aerialist Nik Wallenda becomes
the first person to walk a high wire across the Little Colorado River Gorge
near Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. Wallenda wasn’t wearing a safety
harness as he made the quarter-mile traverse on a 2-inch-thick steel cable some
1,500 feet above the gorge. In June of the previous year, Wallenda, a member of
the famous Flying Wallendas family of circus performers, became the first
person to walk a tightrope over Niagara Falls.
Born in Sarasota, Florida, in 1979, Wallenda is part of a family
that traces its history as circus performers back to the Austro-Hungarian
empire in the late 18th century. His great-grandfather, Karl, who was born in
Germany in 1905, developed an aerial act with several other performers in
Europe in the early 1920s. By the late 1920s, the group, which eventually came
to be known as the Flying Wallendas, was performing in America with Ringling
Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. In 1947, Karl Wallenda invented the
seven-person chair pyramid, a feat performed on a tightrope. After being
performed for many years, the pyramid proved fatal in 1962, when two men died
and one of Karl’s sons was paralyzed when the trick went wrong. In the
aftermath of the tragedy, Karl turned his attention to “sky walks” between
buildings and across stadiums on a high wire. In 1978, he fell to his death at
age 73 while walking a cable between two structures in Puerto Rico.
Nik Wallenda learned to walk on a wire as a young boy, and made
his professional debut as an aerialist at age 13. He went on to set a number of
Guinness World Records, including the longest tightrope crossing on a bicycle
and the highest eight-person tightrope pyramid. In 2011, Wallenda hung from a
high-flying helicopter above Branson, Missouri, by his teeth. That same year,
he and his mother successfully completed the high-wire walk in Puerto Rico that
had killed Karl Wallenda.
On June 15, 2012, Nik Wallenda became the first person to walk
directly over Niagara Falls on a high wire. He crossed an 1,800-foot-long,
7-ton wire from the U.S. side of the falls to the Canadian side at a height of
around 200 feet in about 25 minutes. Because the event was televised around the
world, broadcast officials required the famous funambulist to wear a safety
tether in case he fell.
The following June, Wallenda made his Grand Canyon traverse.
Wearing jeans and a T-shirt and holding a 43-pound balancing pole, he prayed
out loud as he walked untethered across a 1,400-foot-long, 8.5-ton cable
suspended 1,500 feet above the Little Colorado River. It was the highest walk
of his career, and he completed it in just less than 23 minutes.