You might be surprised at how much land there is to hunt. Take your home and start researching what lands are available to hunt within an hour or so of driving. Within that basic range, find all WMA's, BLM property, any federal forests, private forests (corporations will often allow hunting as long as it doesn't interfere with their business use of the land. Then call your local Game Warden(s) and ask for recommendations. They patrol all of those areas and know which ones have animals or not and which ones have lots of hunters or not. Don't worry so much about how crowded a place is. If you can find a nice high spot, all of those people may push animals towards you.
Check with your county AG department and see which farmers & ranchers are having problems with ground squirrels. Start checking with those landowners about hunting ground squirrels (they're not the kind of squirrel you eat but you'll be feeding many predators). After that, ask about predator hunting. Cattle and sheep ranchers don't like having coyotes around, especially during calving season. It's okay if every rancher only allows you to hunt squirrels and predators. But after a while, you may get permission for a few of them for hunting deer, turkey or other critters you're interested in. Just remember, those ranchers and farmers are on their property a lot because it's their day job and they often know what critters are where on their property. They can be a gold mine of information about their property and neighboring properties, even if they're next to some WMA, etc.
If you put just this amount of effort in (and there's other things you could do), you're going to get outside a lot, find places to hunt and find game to hunt. If you go at this hard for a year, it will be fun to see your growth as a hunter and outdoorsman.