‘Volcano Live!’ Daredevil Nik Wallenda defies gravity, lava with wirewalk over volcano

SARASOTA, Fla. – Nik Wallenda, and his wife Erendira, turned in another aerial classic Wednesday night. Only, this time, they had to wear gas masks because there was a volcano below them seething with corrosive fog and updrafts that felt “like a hurricane.”

National audiences tuned in to ABC’s “Volcano Live! With Nik Wallenda” and watched Sarasota’s most famous wirewalker emerge from the surrealistic spectacle in Nicaragua drenched in sweat and praising Jesus.

With a battery of airborne and ground cameras tracking his every move above Masaya volcano’s liver-shaped lake of red magma 1,800 feet below, Wallenda took just over 31 nail-biting minutes to follow 1,800 feet of steel cable to deliver an unprecedented performance.

Eyes protected by goggles, breathing filtered air to protect his lungs, the 40-year-old multiple Guinness World Record holder vanished into clouds of noxious fumes and watery heat, his progress monitored on a split-screen thermal camera. The wire took a 60-foot dip on the front end and required a 60-foot climb on the other side. And for the fifth time in eight years, a global audience breathed a sigh of collective relief when he cleared the wire.

‘Volcano Live!’ Daredevil Nik Wallenda to wirewalk over Nicaraguan volcano 

In an opening act, Erendira performed graceful yoga in mid-air above the caldera, pulling upside down toe hangs from her aerial hoop, or lyra. She removed her mask in order to suspend her weight with her teeth.

Claiming to have been “freaked out” when his father Terry Troffer told him weeks ago that Masaya’s fumes were leaving slippery deposits on the equipment, Wallenda was as sure-footed Wednesday evening as he was during his nationally televised debut in 2012.

More: Nik Wallenda’s wife hangs by her teeth from helicopter over Niagara Falls

Two-inch thick steel cable and all-weather jacket drenched by roiling mists from Niagara Falls, the eighth-generation acrobat now renowned for panoramic theater took 25 minutes to cross into Canada from New York and scampered over the last few yards into Ontario.

One year later, the challenge was heat, not water. Working around a ban on stunting in Grand Canyon National Park, where Arizona’s summer highs average 106 degrees, Wallenda turned to nearby Navajo Nation to activate Plan B.

He hired a helicopter to lay cable across a 1,500-foot deep gorge walled by a shear butte, a target covering roughly the same distance as his rim-to-rim on Masaya. More than halfway through that 23-minute journey, a sudden hard gust forced Wallenda into a crouch and a prayer. “Calm these winds in the name of Jesus,” he implored into his microphone. “Help me to relax, Lord.”

A snowstorm raked Chicago two days before his November 2014 double-wirewalk spectacle in the Windy City; by showtime, the temperatures had stabilized in the mid-40s. One of those excursions involved climbing a 19-degree incline over nearly 500 feet; the other was a 94-foot blindfolded quickie that took a scant 1 minute, 17 seconds, to complete.

But the illusion that all Wallenda wirewalks are routine literally crashed to the ground in February 2017. That’s when, during rehearsals for Circus Sarasota, Wallenda’s dangerous eight-person pyramid fell apart. Five performers — including sister Lijana and aunt Rietta, who fell the farthest, from 40 feet — hit the ground.

More: Flying Wallendas safely cross Times Square on high wire 25 stories above the pavement

The accident drew immediate comparisons to a similar 1962 disaster, when Wallenda’s legendary great grandfather Karl watched his own 7-person pyramid disintegrate during a live performance in Detroit. Karl’s son-in-law and nephew died, and son Mario spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

Karl would fall 200 feet to his death in 1978, at age 73, during an unscheduled exhibition over the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico.

No one was killed or paralyzed during the Sarasota accident, but Nik Wallenda briefly considered retirement.

In 2019, however, he and Lijana, who needed reconstructive facial surgery as a result of the spill, reunited on the wire once more, this time above New York’s Times Square. It was Nik Wallenda’s fourth live network special.

Wallenda has long said “lots of people can do what I do” and has credited other family members for being “better wirewalkers than me.” Qualitative assessments aside, however, what seems clear is that when it comes to self-promotion and sheer willpower, Wallenda is peerless.

The late Canadian wirewalker Jay Cochran, for instance, tried for 30 years to secure permits to perform over Niagara Falls. Wallenda cut through the red tape in two years. “Nik,” conceded Cochrane, “has an opportunity before him like none other in history.”

Famed French aerialist Philippe Petit, who performed a 45-minute wirewalk between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in 1974 with neither a shoulder harness nor a permit, tried unsuccessfully for 25 years to get permission to cross the Grand Canyon — in the exact same location Wallenda did in 2013.

Wallenda is under contract to ABC for one more special. Competitive family members have wanted to replicate Karl Wallenda’s double-headstand performance above Georgia’s Tallulah Gorge in 1970, but no word on that project has been forthcoming.

Maybe the only thing keeping Wallenda from becoming a victim of his own success is a creative answer to the obvious question: What does a circus performer who conquered a volcano do for an encore?

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