There are many reasons she could be in the wrong place to get to the trailhead. A Google mis-direction for starters. Very common and dangerous. There are trails all over that mountain, but may have inconspicuous trailheads, so she drove right by, and maybe even thought she was in a different place than she actually was.
The road might roller-coaster (it's forest road), so she might have thought she was walking down when she was going up or vice versa. After all, her car seems to have been twiddled around in orientation, or not. It wouldn't surprise me if she wasn't totally discombobulated. She might have gone down to her car again, if up wasn't working for her.
If she really planned to go up that mountain, she was starting way too late in the day. She might make the peak, but would never make it down. Plus, she'd already expended energy dealing with her car: I mean, if your car is in that condition, you can assume she expended a lot of energy right then. She could even have been there for hours, she could be head-injured and not thinking straight, she could be in a state of bliss from her Zen-time and/or something else.
The trail is 10.3 miles at the fastest. Challenging, and over 4 hours. Steep elevation gain. Likely empty. She was nowhere near that trailhead.
To me, the sweat pants are very troublesome, since they almost always have cotton content. This would make her prone to hypothermia, especially if they'd been all sweaty already, and would be disastrous if they got wet, e.g. in a blanket of fog. We don't know if she was wearing lugged hiking boots, which would be de rigueur on that trail. No "10 Essentials" would be a big red flag, especially in such a remote area and so alone. I'm not sure if she had her pack, water, etc.
Perhaps she already had hypothermia by the time she set out, and already wasn't thinking straight. Heck, maybe she even got hit by the rock in her car.
52 miles of hiking is out of the question. A thru hiker might manage half of that if they were in excellent shape. It's possible maybe in OR and WA on the PCT, but that's after months of hiking, and being motivated to beat winter or catch a plane. Those thru hikers hike far into the night. Besides, in her scenario, you're not making it back to your car before dark. Anything you could do at that point would be extremely risky: you could keep going and almost certainly trip, or you could stop where you are and die of hypothermia. Both could happen. And the temperature would suddenly have dropped as the day got late.
IMO her brains were compromised for whatever reason, and there's no telling where she is.
The closest comparator I have to this case is last year's in the Olympics, Laura Macke, about the same time of year.
