Overlooking water long gone: Is promontory a basin and range word?

Basin and range promontories often oversee water that existed and will exist again, but that escapes our view.

“I am persuaded that the coyotes in my valley, which is narrow and beset with steep, sharp hills, in long passages steer by the pinnacles of the sky-line, going with head cocked to one side to keep to the left or right of such and such a promontory.”
The Land of Little Rain
Mary Hunter Austin

Promontory, but that’s a word that relates to bodies of water, that is, the rocks or high points that overlook them. Here is the full entry, written by Robert Hass, in Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, the really great resource for anyone interested in words about the landscape (and who isn't!):

promontory
A promontory is a point of high land that juts out into the sea or some other body of water; a headland. It comes from a Latin word, promontorium, meaning a mountain ridge. It’s usually a maritime term. Here is Czeslaw Milosz in Visions from San Francisco Bay, writing in English about Robinson Jeffers: “I even reproached Jeffers for his descriptive passages, too much those of an amateur painter who sets up his easel on a wild promontory.” But the term also refers to freshwater topography. Here is Henry David Thoreau in Walden: “Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three small maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stems of three aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next to the water.” And from the West, here is Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains: “This mountaingirdled lake lay before me, with its margin broken up into bays and promontories, most picturesquely clothed by huge sugar pines.” Another instance is Promontory Point on Great Salt Lake. ROBERT HASS
Home Ground
Barry Lopez & Debra Gwartney

Many of the promontories of the basin and range stand over lakes that are absent to the human eye, with its infinitesimally narrow view. What we see as desert peaks were a blink ago headlands standing against wind-whipped waves. Entire mountain ranges would have once stood as promontories over the long lakes on their flanks. So, while we might not see the water except in our imaginations, the promontories remain.

​Meanwhile the coyotes continue to guide themselves by desert landmarks.

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Interesting basin and range promontory factoid:
Promontory is also the place in Utah where the railroads met and the Golden Spike was spiked creating the first transcontinental railway.