Installing GDAL with Anaconda
There seems to be an incompatibility between the latest version of conda and vs2015_runtime and conda-forge gdal.
If I create a conda-forge env and specify vs2015_runtime=14, everything works:
conda create -n testgdal -c conda-forge gdal vs2015_runtime=14
activate testgdal
(testgdal) python
Python 3.6.6 | packaged by conda-forge | (default, Jul 26 2018, 11:48:23) [MSC v.1900 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from osgeo import gdal
>>>
https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/291932