Plus… this isn’t a remote area—you can walk all the way over the mountains from Santa Cruz to Los Gatos in less than ten hours. Even if you were too panicked to think of an obvious strategy like “follow a stream” or “always walk downhill” and were essentially stumbling around blind, it seems like you’d be bound to run into a hiking trail or other landmark by chance alone within a day or two.
Was this a phone interview, by any chance?