"Maybe she simply got lost and didn't know how to locate herself."

She was there for several days, with the highway going roughly north and south on the west side, and the mountains on the east. The sun sets in the west. She was in sand after she left the road. Her jeep made tracks. All she had to do was follow them.

"It's not like she just drove out into Death Valley, she was in found in the southwest corner of Death Valley National Park."

Where she was found, it seems that she never actually went into the park proper, because I don't see how she got as close to Trona as she did from inside the park. She hit the very outside SW corner of it, probably accidentally. What she appeared to have done was just drive out into an unknown, uninhabited part of raw desert without a care in the world. She had a flat and kept on going. What was her plan if she had another flat?

Children are totally dependent on the decisions that their parents make, they don't have the option of making their own decisions, esp in cases like this. She made the decisions, he paid for them.

By the way, one article indicated that she used to live in San Antonio, so I would suspect that the desert wasn't new to her, which makes this incident stranger still.