'Volcano Live with Nik Wallenda': From Niagara Falls to Times Square stunt, Nik's guts come from daredevil family
After braving the Time Square tight rope walk last year, Nik Wallenda, 41, will walk over a Nicaragua volcano this week. Even for a man like Wallenda, who has acrobatics in his blood, this walk will be like no other. Sure, he has laid down on the line but this is different.
If he trips, it won't be broken bones - he will fall straight into an active volcano. But this isn't the first time he's performed daredevil stunts on a high wire sending chills down our spine. He was the first person to walk a tightrope stretched directly over Niagara Falls. He also performed while hanging from a helicopter at 250 feet, before which he rode a bicycle along a high-wire 260 feet above the ocean, setting a new Guinness World Record for the highest bike ride on a high-wire, beating his own record.
As one would expect, he also proposed to his now-wife Erendira on a wire 30 feet high during a performance in Montreal, Quebec. Wallenda holds eleven Guinness World Records for various acrobatic feats.
So what makes Wallenda so keen to live life so high strung? The answer lies in his past.
Wallenda grew up all over the place as the family moved around a lot in their mobile home. Born in Sarasota, Florida in 1979 to Delilah Wallenda and Terry Troffer, who were circus performers. A seventh-generation member of The Flying Wallendas family of aerialists, he is of Austro-Hungarian descent. The family had been performing in circuses dating back to the 1700s.
His parents knew that he was natural when at the age of 2, he started climbed up on the crossbar of an unassembled sing set and did a somersault - and they brought him into the circus life. His first public performance was at SeaWorld San Diego in 1981. He was already walking on the wire on his own by 4 and had at 6, he set the goal to walk on a tight rope over the Niagra Falls after being taken by its majesty during a family visit. He made his professional tightrope walking debut at age 13.
He got accepted into medical school when he got older but the tension of the tightrope still clung on to him. He gave it up soon after it in 1998 when he participated in the re-creation of Karl Wallenda's seven-person pyramid on the high-wire in Detroit with his family. He was 19 at the time.
Karl Wallenda, who Nik is a direct descendant of, made the family famous in the 1920s after he started performances without safety nets. Nik has also shown his love for not using safety equipment and has said in previous interviews that his great-grandfather taught him that safety nets offer a false sense of security. Not that he had a "death wish in any way" but he believes that irrespective of the net, things could go wrong and that's he's not scared of dying.
Wallenda's children are sometimes part of the act. He's lost several members of his family to it too - Karl Wallenda, 73, fell to his death from a high wire strung between two buildings in Puerto Rico following which his nephew and son-in-law died while his son was paralyzed. His sister Lijana broke nearly every bone in her face after a fall during their pyramid performance in 2017. Five performers were seriously injured when they fell more than 40 feet but they all survived in this case.
A religious person, he makes sure to join his family in prayer and he always wears a cross as he performs. He says he doesn't "test God" and really just wants to be a nice guy living an upright life. However, he loves a challenge. "Don't tell me 'It can't be done', because I'll find a way to do it", he said in an interview in 2012. "My whole thing is I don't want to just break records. I want to set myself apart from any record that's been done before," he said, in another one more recently.
The special will air live on ABC at 8 p.m. ET/PT | 7 p.m. CT on Wednesday, March 4.
