From an article:
Ms. Largay had left the trail in one its most rugged sections, with thick underbrush and fir trees packed so tightly they almost seem to merge.
“You step off the trail 20 or 50 feet and turn around, it’s very difficult to see where the trail was,” said Douglas Dolan, 53, a volunteer who spent time last summer doing trail maintenance in the area. “If you didn’t know which way the trail was, you could easily walk in circles for hours.”
I also read that her tent was black. It would have been almost impossible to spot it from the air in that stuff.
She suffered from anxiety attacks and her former hiking partner said she had a lousy sense of direction. If she didn't have a compass, it wouldn't be a bit hard for her to get just a little bit off the trail and freak out.
The brain can do some weird stuff when you're frightened. Years ago, one of my dad's co-workers got lost while hunting in so. Idaho. This is very open country compared to Maine. This guy was lost for about a week. He freaked out. He later said that at one point he stood on a ridge top and saw cars on a road below him but his brain was fried and he went the opposite direction.
