Chicago lets out a sigh of relief as daredevil successfully tightropes across buildings
Without a harness or safety net, daredevil Nik Wallenda made his way across two different high wires hundreds of feet above Chicago on Sunday night, breaking records along the way.
For his first walk, Wallenda thought he was going uphill on a wire suspended at a record-setting 15 degree incline, from the 588-foot Marina Tower West to the top of the 671-foot Leo Burnett building on the other side of the Chicago River, Time reports. It turns out the incline was actually 19 degrees. After completing that stretch, he put on a blindfold and made his way between the Marina Towers.
Wallenda comes from a family of tightrope walkers. In 2012, he walked over Niagara Falls from the U.S. into Canada, and in 2013 he went over the Little Colorado River Gorge. Like his earlier walks, Sunday night's was televised, and the Discovery Channel had a 10 second delay just in case something bad happened. There was just one thing that Wallenda had to change: The wire was bouncing too much at one point, so he decided against taking a planned selfie. --Catherine Garcia
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Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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