Carolyn Garcia

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 with the American rock band, Grateful Dead. Biography Carolyn Elizabeth Adams was born on May 6, 1946, in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she also grew up. 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 eventually fired for "dipping into the experimental psychedelic chemicals she was analyzing." In early 1964, she met Neal Cassady, who introduced her to Ken Kesey and his friends, one of whom gave her the name "Mountain Girl" because she was a "little bit wild." 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. Kesey was arrested for marijuana possession in La Honda, in 1965 and fled to Mexico. He returned to the United States and, just nights after being sentenced to six months in the San Mateo County Jail, he was arrested again, this time with Adams, while smoking marijuana on the rooftop of Stewart Brand's home on Telegraph Hill, San Francisco.