Aerialist Nik Wallenda poses for the camera in front of the Grand Canyon ahead of his attempt to cross it next Monday

Calcutta, June 20: The first man in history to walk on a tightrope across the Niagara Falls is ready to walk into the record books again. This time, Nik Wallenda has set his sights on the Grand Canyon. The walk — his biggest feat yet — will take him across the canyon with nothing but the surging waters of the Little Colorado 1,500ft below.

“We will put a cable up from one edge of the canyon to another in the south face. I intend to walk for 1,400ft. It should take me around 20 minutes,” the skywalker told The Telegraph over phone from Florida. The stunt will take place on Monday, June 24.

Last year, on June 15, Wallenda walked 1,800ft across a two-inch-wide wire to cross directly over the Falls from the US into Canada. The walk took 25 minutes.

While all that the world saw was a speck of red perilously poised in mid-air against the misty cascading waters, Wallenda says he could barely see the cable on which he was walking. “I did look around a bit but the mist was too heavy.”

But the cable, made slippery by the spray of water, never became a threat. “My shoes are made by my mother. They have elk skin suede leather bottom and are designed to grip the wire if I am walking in wet conditions. At no point did I think I could fall.”

If his mother Delilah designs his shoes, father Terry is his safety co-ordinator and uncle Mike his team’s lead engineer. The high-wire walker is a seventh generation member of a family called the Flying Wallendas which traces its roots to 1780 Austria-Hungary, where the ancestors travelled as a band of acrobats, aerialists, jugglers, animal trainers and trapeze artists.

The preparations for the Grand Canyon walk have been going on for months. “For Niagara, I was practising on a wire with the same tension and nearly the same length but lower to the ground.” For the final walk, the cable was suspended 196ft above the rim of the waterfall. This time, the height from the ground is 1,500ft.

“We try to replicate the worst case situation for rehearsals. So there were fire trucks creating heavy mist and wind machines creating wind before Niagara. There won’t be mist in the canyon but there will be strange wind directions. So the wind machines are back, to simulate winds — updrafts, side drafts — in every direction you can imagine, trying to recreate what I would face.”

Also vital to the preparation is the mindgame. “While I’m training at a lower height from the ground, I am imagining myself to be over the Grand Canyon. When I’m walking over the Grand Canyon, I’ll be imagining myself back at training.”

It would be the toughest walk in Wallenda’s career as this time it seems he would be allowed to walk without a safety tether. He bristles at the mention of the protection he took for the Niagara walk.

“There are thousands of videos of my earlier walks on YouTube. Not in one will you see me wearing a harness. If there is one thing I’d change about that walk it is the harness. I had my lawyers fight against it but that was the only way they’d (the TV channel) give me permission.”

Last August, after Niagara Falls, he completed another tightrope walk 100 feet above a beach without tethers.

But he is not foolhardy. His idol is his great grandfather Karl Wallenda, who brought the family from Europe to the US and performed feats like creating a pyramid of seven people on the wire. Unlike him, the 33-year-old father of three says he would not carry on beyond 50 years. “The older you get the more dangerous it is. You are no longer as strong as your mind thinks you are. You got to know when to stop.”

Karl died of a fall from a 300-ft-long wire suspended between two towers of the Conrad Condado Plaza Hotel, Puerto Rico, in 1978. He was 73 then. The great grandson is nowhere near hanging up his boots though.