Skywire Live: Nik Wallenda walks across the Grand Canyon LIVE | Sunday, June 23 at 8pm ET on Discovery! Channel
At a height of 1,500 feet above the Little Colorado River Gorge, Nik Wallenda will walk on a wire that is just 2 inches thick.
While traversing the 1,400-foot-wide gap between the cliffs, Nik will have to adjust to sudden wind gusts of over 20 mph with no safety tether attaching him to his line. Daredevil Nik Wallenda explains his family’s long history of walking the wire, all on skywire live.
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In “Skywire Live With Nik Wallenda,” starting at 8 p.m. ET tonight (Sunday, June 23) on Discovery Channel (and live in Eastern and Central time zones), the scion of the famed “Flying Wallendas” family of acrobats and daredevils will begin his attempt to traverse the Arizona’s Colorado River Gorge, near the Grand Canyon, on a two-inch-thick cable.
Unlike his successful Guinness World Record attempt to cross Niagara Falls last year, the 34-year-old husband and father will not be wearing a safety harness, saying that his concerns about potential issues with the harness outweigh its usefulness.
In an interview on May 30, Wallenda talks to Zap2it about his preparation: “I started training when I was two. That’s when I started walking the wire. But we’ll do some very, very specific training starting on June 6, with wind machines, which are in the form of airboats, actually, because I live in Florida. They make great winds of up to 90 miles an hour, with huge fans.
“Well create ramps to create updrafts, simulate worst-case of what I can experience when I’m there.
“But when we put up a cable — It goes up starting on the 4th, I won’t be there, because I’ll be doing the ‘Today’ show in New York — it’ll be about the same distance but low to the ground. It’ll have the same tension, the same feel to it.