Wallenda to attempt Niagara Falls wire walk

NIAGARA FALLS -- Nik Wallenda can't visit a new place without envisioning a wire strung high above his head linking buildings, landmarks, nations.

Even as a 6-year-old at Niagara Falls with his parents, he pictured walking a tightrope over the raging white water.

Now, he's ready to live out that childhood fantasy when he attempts Friday to become the first person to walk a tightrope directly over the brink of Niagara Falls.

"It's just natural," Wallenda, a seventh-generation member of the famed Flying Wallendas, said. "When I drive into a city, I'm always thinking, 'It would be cool to do a walk there.' It's just the way I think and always have."

At 33, he is athletic and solidly built from gym workouts and a lifetime of training. But it's the mental element, trusting in his skill and tuning out the potential danger, that can mean the difference between success and failure.

"You can either talk yourself out of doing something or you can talk yourself into doing something," he said.

Since first stepping on a wire when he was 2, Wallenda, who lives in Sarasota, Fla., has earned six Guinness world records. His family has been performing for audiences at circus-style shows for more than 200 years.

The Niagara Falls walk set for Friday night, above a nearly 200-foot drop and through potentially high winds and vision-obscuring mist, will be unlike anything he's ever done. Because it's over water, the 2-inch-thick wire won't have the usual stabilizer cables to keep it from swinging. Pendulum anchors are designed to keep it from twisting under his elkskin-soled shoes on the 1,800-foot walk from the U.S. shore to Canada.

"The thing about this cable, it's unique to me even, and because of that I'll be very, very focused on it," he said.

About a dozen other tightrope artists have crossed the Niagara Gorge downstream, dating to Jean Francois Gravelet, also known as The Great Blondin, in 1859.

But no one has walked directly over the falls and authorities haven't allowed any tightrope acts in the area since 1896. It took Wallenda two years to persuade U.S. and Canadian authorities to grant permission.

The Wallendas, the first family of the high wire, trace their fearless roots to 1780 Austria-Hungary, when ancestors traveled as a band of acrobats, aerialists, jugglers, animal trainers and a bit later, trapeze artists. The family has been touched by tragedy, most notably when Nik Wallenda's great-grandfather and the family patriarch, Karl Wallenda, fell to his death during a wire walk in 1978 in Puerto Rico.

Wallenda will have one safeguard, a tether that will keep him out of the water if he falls, but not on the wire. ABC, which is televising the walk, insisted on it. Wallenda said he only agreed because he's not willing to lose this chance and needs the network's sponsorship to help offset some of the $1.3 million cost of the spectacle.