Carolyn Elizabeth Garcia (née Adams; born May 7, 1946), also known as "Mountain Girl", is an American Merry Prankster and the former wife of Jerry Garcia, the lead vocalist and guitar player of the band Grateful Dead.
Biography
Carolyn Elizabeth Adams was born on May 6, 1946 in Poughkeepsie, New York. She attended Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School in Hyde Park. Shortly after she was expelled from high school, she traveled to Palo Alto, California in 1963 with her older brother Don. She got a job at Stanford University, working for Carl Djerassi in the organic chemistry lab, analyzing psychiatric drugs, and she was fired for "dipping into the experimental psychedelic chemicals which she was analyzing." Journalist Tom Wolfe described his first impression of a teenage Adams as "a tall girl, big and beautiful with dark brown hair falling down to her shoulders except that the lower two-thirds of her falling hair looks like a paintbrush dipped in cadmium yellow from where she dyed it blond in Mexico."
Cassady took her to La Honda, California, Kesey's base of operations, where she quickly joined the inner circle of Pranksters and became romantically involved with Kesey, having a daughter by him named Sunshine.
She had a relationship with another Prankster named George Walker, who later became her husband in 1966. They separated in December 1966 and were divorced in 1978. After splitting with Walker, she began a relationship with Jerry Garcia, but they did not marry. While living together over the next decade, they raised Sunshine along with their two daughters.
Garcia and Adams separated in 1975 after he began a relationship with filmmaker Deborah Koons. Although Garcia and Adams reconciled after the dissolution of his relationship with Koons in 1977, they stopped cohabiting a year later (save for occasional holiday reunions) due to the guitarist's addictions to heroin and cocaine.
After marrying "partly for tax purposes and partly out of a fond flickering of a once-bright romance"
Carolyn Garcia currently sits on the boards of the Rex Foundation and the Furthur Foundation, and she is on the advisory board of the Marijuana Policy Project. She formerly served on the board of the Women's Visionary Council. Garcia lives near her daughter, Annabelle Garcia, on the Kesey family farm southeast of Pleasant Hill, Oregon.