late season wyoming cow

I have been lurking here and reading for sometime but this is my first post.
My son and I have been planning to start elk hunting in Wyoming for a long time. We have been researching and reading all we can and this year have decided to just pick a unit get some left over cow tags and go. He is in high school so we plan to go over the christmas break. We got tags for unit 7 and we actually spent a few day in the unit over the summer. We drove alot of the county roads over several different areas in the unit. Now I have a few question. On the Wyoming web site it list unit 7 and a unit with limited public access. However when we were there driving around it looked like it was pretty easy to find public areas to hunt. Is it hard to find public ground there? Also I was wonder if anyone could give us some direction on areas to look at for late season.

Call the BLM and order a map. $4 bucks a piece and it will show you what is public and what is private. Or get a chip for your gps.

Get the onXmaps chip and use it with the garmin basecamp software

I forgot to mention I do have a garmin and the onxmaps chip so that is sort of where my question came from. It seemed very easy to find public. I was just thinking I was missing something because it as listed as a difficult unit for public access. I have spent alot of time looking at the basecamp software. I quess it would really depend on the weather and snow but I was hoping to get some tips or direct on what areas I should focus on.

Based on only 1 year of experience in WY I have found that even though there is public land, the "*" that indicates limited public land might mean that there is limited public land where the animals actually are. Any more seasoned WY hunters care to comment? I bought a zone 98 cow/calf tag so I could actually carry a gun while scouting for elk after a pronghorn trip. Even though there is a TON of public land in zone 98 the areas where there were likely elk in september, coupled with the fact that I couldn't go into wilderness because I'm a non-resident, really limited the amount of land I had available to hunt with the possibility of seeing elk.