All of these places mentioned hold plenty of bears.
It's just a matter of finding the pockets that hold bears and hunting those exclusively. That will increase productivity to the point a single day out hunting is equivalent to 20-30 days for someone who is just out "looking for bears"
I often tell people looking for spring bear, it's best to not even look for bears but rather grassy areas where it is getting nipped. Find a few areas like that and then focus time looking for bears only in those areas.
It's totally possible to aimlessly wander along logging roads and looking in cuts where bears just don't hang out, which is probably around 90% of area in any given MU, which means it's easy to be in the wrong place 90% of the time at best looking for an animal that comes and goes to feed and generally doesn't hang out in the open.
Sign such as nipped grass and dandelions are static. They don't wander off back into the woods. They are either there or they are not. So if you hunt for nipped grass rather than bears, find enough spots with hits where you can spend a day checking in and out of those spots, you'll be bumping into a lot of bears.
PS: I am willing to bet the area you got the tick bite is viable bear turf. Sometimes sign of a good area crawls up your leg and bites you