Need help installing fiona and geopandas for python in Windows 10 - getting can't load requested DLL error

I am trying to install fiona and geopandas for python on Windows 10 and keep running into an error "ERROR 1: Can't load requested DLL".

I know this question is similar to other questions that have been asked, but I have followed the steps in multiple answers and tutorials and still can't seem to get this to work.

The closest I got was using the steps outlined in this tutorial : https://geoffboeing.com/2014/09/using-geopandas-windows/

and are summarized as follows:

1. installed the .whl files for rtree, pyproj, shapely, gdal, geopandas, fiona from https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/

   • Rtree-0.8.3-cp37-cp37m-win_amd64.whl
   • pyproj-2.2.1-cp37-cp37m-win_amd64.whl
   • GDAL-3.0.0-cp37-cp37m-win_amd64.whl
   • geopandas-0.5.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl
   • Fiona-1.8.6-cp37-cp37m-win_amd64.whl
   • Shapely-1.6.4.post2-cp37-cp37m-win_amd64.whl

2. navigated to download folder and used pip install to install GDAL wheel

3. added the osgeo path to my windows user Path environment variable

4. used pip install to install remaining wheels (geopandas last), everything installed without errors
5. As a check, I ran gdalinfo --help-general and get the following output:

This is where I get the "ERROR 1: Can't load requested DLL:" error. It says it cannot find the specified module "ogr_FileGDB.dll". The weird thing is, that .dll is actually in the location that it is looking in???

Also, in python shell, when trying to import fiona or geopandas I get the following errors:

This is beyond my level of troubleshooting...would really appreciate if anyone could get this thing working for me!!!!

FYI - running Python 3.7.3, Windows 10, pip is updated.

Lastly and potentially important (not sure how it plays in?) I already have a GDAL_DATA system variable defined, and also (maybe incorrectly?) also tried adding the osgeo path to my system path variable: