A nice look, and a nicely thought-out backstory. If you want dead-simple mountain symbology, just go for strings of open-bottom triangles. You don't even have to draw - it could all be type: sans-serif lambdas :-).

There's plenty of precedent for calling any ol' undesirable wasteland a desert - such as much of the continental USA used to be termed, between the Mississippi and the Rockies.