An Arizona wholesaler wanted to buy his geodes by the pound, to saw open, dye and sell as $120 gift-shop pairs. This veteran Iowa geode hunter chose instead to sell them unopened for $49 — so the first eyes ever to see inside are yours.

After forty-one seasons digging geodes out of the creek banks of Lee County, Iowa, Merle Hulsebus no longer has the back or the knees to dig. The Tri-State Ledger looked into a story that has rock hounds and grandparents talking well beyond the county line.

Merle Hulsebus in the machine shed behind his house in Argyle, Iowa. Forty-one seasons of digging, and two hundred forty sets left.

Argyle, Iowa. Merle Hulsebus, seventy-three, will not be going back down to the creeks. In the machine shed behind his house, five-gallon buckets and wooden crates line the wall. Inside are hundreds of rough, round stones, bumpy as a head of cauliflower, some the size of a hen’s egg, some barely bigger than a golf ball.

These are not ordinary stones. They are geodes — hollow rocks that began forming on the floor of a shallow sea some 340 million years ago and have been sitting in the clay along the creeks of southeast Iowa ever since. Merle and his wife, LaVonne, dug them out of the creek banks one at a time over four decades.

Today LaVonne is gone. Merle can no longer dig. And a buyer for a crystal and home-décor wholesaler wants to buy his entire collection by the pound, saw it open, dye the insides hot pink and electric blue and sell the halves in gift shops for up to $120 a pair.

Merle said no.

What he decided to do instead has surprised everyone who knows him: sell what is left exactly the way it came out of the ground — unopened — directly to the people who will crack them open at their own kitchen tables. For $49.

This is how forty-one years of walking Iowa creek beds ends — and why one man’s decision has carried a long way past Argyle.

The creek in his blood: when a farmer’s son picked up the wrong rock

Every geode came out by hand, one at a time. A good day is eight hours on your knees in the clay.

Merle Hulsebus did not pick geodes. Geodes picked him.

His father, Elmer, farmed corn and soybeans on a hundred and sixty acres west of Argyle, with a creek running along the bottom of the back forty. Merle rode the tractor with him from the time he was six. He learned to read a field before he could read a newspaper.

But what stopped him was never what grew in the ground. It was what had been lying in it all along.

“Dad would grab a handful of that black dirt and say, that’s what feeds us,” Merle says, one hand resting on an open bucket. “Then one afternoon I was hauling rocks off the creek crossing and picked up one that didn’t weigh what it should have. Round as a baseball and light as a biscuit. I cracked it on the drawbar of the tractor and the inside was nothing but crystal. Dad didn’t know what it was. The ag teacher in Keokuk didn’t either.”

Merle was fifteen years old. That strange, light rock decided the rest of his life.

A science teacher in Fort Madison gave it a name: a Keokuk geode. Lee County sits in the heart of the tri-state geode beds, where Iowa, Illinois and Missouri meet. Collectors have come here since the 1800s, and in 1967 Iowa made the geode its official state rock.

Merle kept farming. But on Saturdays, with a garden spade and a five-gallon bucket, he started walking the creeks.

LaVonne: forty-one years of creek beds, and a ledger that never missed a stone

He dug. She mapped, counted and wrote it down. Two hundred and twelve pages, starting in 1983.

LaVonne Hulsebus was not a geologist. She carried rural mail out of the Argyle post office for thirty-one years. But the first time Merle put a geode in her hand, had her feel how light it was and then opened it in front of her, she never looked at that county the same way again.

“I didn’t talk her into anything,” Merle says. “I handed her a rock. She did the rest herself.”

She knew every gravel road and every farmer on her route, and she got them permission to dig and picked where to go. Merle dug. LaVonne mapped. He pulled the geodes out of the clay; she counted them, sorted them and wrote each find into a hardback ledger: creek, farm, date, how many.

Forty-one years. Forty-one seasons. Whole weekends down in the creek beds with a thermos on the tailgate, looking for hollow stones in Iowa clay.

Between them they brought home well over twenty thousand geodes. Some were no bigger than a walnut. One took two days to dig out of a bank on Sugar Creek and came home weighing sixty-one pounds. All of it genuine. All of it from the same county.

Merle sold sparingly — to rock shops, to two county museums, once to a school district for its fourth-grade classrooms. LaVonne handled the letters, the shipping and the books. Merle knew how to dig and how to tell a good one by the feel of it.

Then, in 2024, everything changed.

LaVonne is gone: when the shed becomes his last refuge

Four in the morning in the shed. The water bucket and the brush ran most days for a year and a half.

Spring 2024. LaVonne Hulsebus passed away. They had been married forty-seven years.

“LaVonne was my compass, and I mean that plain,” Merle says. “Down on the creek she knew where to go. In the house she knew what to do with what came out of it. Without her I’m a man with a spade and no idea where to put it.”

For months he did not open a bucket. The shed stayed shut. His son Curtis, a lock and dam operator on the Mississippi at Davenport, called every evening and offered to come down, sort the stones and call the old rock shops. Merle told him no.

One morning in November, not sleeping, he went out to the shed at four o’clock and switched on the light. He opened a bucket. He took one geode, scrubbed the clay off it with a brush, weighed it in his palm and set it on the bench — the same thing he used to do while LaVonne sat at the end of the bench with the ledger.

“I couldn’t have told you why I was sorting,” he says. “There was nobody to show them to. I sorted because the brush and the water made enough noise that the house wasn’t quiet.”

For a year and a half Merle washed and sorted. Every morning. Ten stones. Fifty. Nine hundred sixty. Each one cleaned as if a museum were waiting on it, and each one different, because no two geodes have ever grown the same way.

340 million years old, with an inside nobody has ever seen

A Keokuk geode, opened. The crystals grew inward from the wall, a fraction of an inch at a time, over millions of years.

To understand why Merle’s geodes are unusual, it helps to know what they actually are.

A geode is not a rock in any ordinary sense. It began as a pocket in the mud of a sea that covered this part of North America some 340 million years ago. The pocket hardened into a shell, and mineral-rich water seeped through it, drop by drop, leaving a thin layer of quartz. Then another. Then another. The crystals grew inward toward the empty center, and the stone kept its secret in the clay while the sea dried up and the glaciers came and went.

Crack one open, and something comes out of the dark that nobody on Earth has ever seen.

A hollow lined with crystals in soft lilac fading to white, hundreds of small points catching the light. It grows differently inside every stone, so no two geodes are the same.

“People open one and think somebody must have set those crystals in there,” Merle says, turning an open half under the shop lamp. “Nobody did. It’s just water and time, millions of years of it, in the dark. There’s no way to hurry it and no way to fake it.”

Attempts to imitate the effect fall apart under a magnifying glass. Resin “geodes” poured into a mold, store-bought halves with the color soaked in, crystals glued into a cut cavity — all of them give themselves away up close. A real one does not.

There is a second test, and anybody can run it at the kitchen table. A geode is hollow, so it is noticeably lighter than a solid rock of the same size. Hold a driveway stone in one hand and one of Merle’s geodes in the other, and you feel it right away.

No certificate to interpret. No expert to take on faith. Just your own hand.

Dr. Ingrid Vasbinder, a retired geology professor who taught mineralogy in Iowa City for twenty-eight years, has handled Keokuk geodes for most of her career. “Three things have to be true at the same time,” she says. “The bumpy, cauliflower-like crust on the outside, the weight that is too light for the size, and a quartz lining that grows inward from the wall. A fake can imitate any one of them. Nobody has ever produced all three. And the geode beds themselves are finite — people have been digging these creeks since the 1800s, and what comes out now comes out by the bucket, not by the truckload.”

“Your back will not get you down another creek bank”

Spring 2026. The MRI is read to him in a clinic in Fort Madison, and the verdict is not gentle. Two discs in his lower back are worn through, and both knees are bone on bone — worn out by forty-one years of kneeling in creek beds and hauling buckets up clay banks.

His grip strength is measured the same morning. Thirty-eight pounds. In 1995 it was a hundred and twelve.

“You are not going to dig anymore,” the doctor tells him. “Not one more bucket. If you keep climbing down those banks you are going to lose what you have left in that back.”

Merle took it standing up. He had known for a while. Some mornings he had to sit in the truck with the heater running before his hands would close.

Curtis drove down from Davenport that weekend. He saw the shelves of sorted geodes, the buckets nobody had opened, and his mother’s ledgers stacked on the desk where she left them.

“Dad, you have to do something with all of it,” he said. “Mom would not have wanted them sitting in buckets.”

That one landed harder than the doctor had. Because Merle knew it was true.

The buyer with the clipboard, and the call that changed everything

April 2026. The buyer drove down from the Quad Cities airport to make his offer in person: ninety cents a pound, cash, for the lot.

It started with a phone call. A buyer for a crystal and home-décor wholesaler in Arizona had heard about the Hulsebus collection through rock dealers. That same week he was standing in Merle’s drive, offering to take every bucket by the pound.

Merle asked what he intended to do with them.

Saw them open, dye the halves, polish the edges and sell them by the pair to gift shops, where dyed geode pairs go for $40 to $120.

Merle asked the number. Ninety cents a pound, cash, one appointment. As a price for rock it was fair, and he knew it. But he did the arithmetic standing there in the drive. His geodes would end up next to scented candles, colored like cotton candy, and nobody who bought them would ever know they came out of a Lee County creek bank, one at a time, over forty-one years.

And the buyer would take his margin. The wholesaler would take theirs. The gift shop would take theirs. And the moment that makes a geode a geode — somebody seeing inside for the first time — would happen on a warehouse saw table, with nobody watching.

The decision got made that evening at the kitchen table with Curtis. The geodes would not go to the buyer. They would stay exactly the way they came out of the ground. And they would go straight to the people who would open them.

$49 sets: turning a lifetime of creek seasons into something people can actually open

The inside is the only part of the set that cannot be ordered from anybody.

The idea came from Curtis. The plan was simple: take the geodes Merle had already washed and sorted, put four of them in a plain kraft box with a magnifying glass and two display stands, and sell the sets directly, with nobody in between.

Not $120 a pair. Not $40. $49 for four unopened geodes — a number set to cover the box, the glass, the stands, the packing and the postage, with no gift-shop markup on top of it.

Merle agreed on one condition.

“No fancy marketing,” he says. “I want people to know where the thing in their hand came from. I want them to know it came out of an Iowa creek bank by hand, not out of a bin in a warehouse. And I want them to be the first. Not me, not some warehouse. The person who opens it at their own table is the first person in 340 million years to see inside it.”

What sets these geodes apart from anything sold in a store

The rest of the set is deliberately ordinary: a plain kraft box, a magnifying glass for looking up close at the crystals, and two black display stands for the halves you want to keep out on a shelf. Two hundred forty sets exist. There is no restock, because there is nobody left to dig.

The permissions to dig those creek banks were handshakes with farmers LaVonne knew from her mail route, and they end with him. This is not warehouse stock — it is what two people brought up out of the ground over four decades.

“I don’t want anybody’s charity,” Merle says. “I want these on kitchen tables in front of kids who still ask what’s inside things. People who will tell their grandkids where it came from. People who know the difference between a rock that came out of a creek and one that came out of a dye bath.”

Rock hounds of thirty years share their stories

The first thing most buyers do is weigh one in their palm.

Word of the sets moved through rock-hound circles first. People who had bought geodes from Merle over the years started writing in.

“The first gift I ever gave her that nobody had ever seen inside”

Merle expected rock hounds. What he got was grandparents.

Merle figured he would be selling to rock people. What happened next caught him off guard.

Grandparents buy them for grandkids. Parents for the child who takes everything apart. Wives for husbands who have everything. The set turned into something people do together.

It makes a certain sense. A geode is one of the few gifts that surprises the giver, too. Neither of you knows what is inside until it opens. And then there are two halves — one for each of you.

How to get a set before the buckets are empty

Two hundred forty sets on the shelf. “After that there is nothing to pack, because there is nobody digging.”

What is in those buckets is everything left from forty-one years of creek seasons with LaVonne. Nobody is going back down to dig those banks. When the last set is packed, it is finished.

The launch price is $49. That is not a promotion. It is the decision of a seventy-three-year-old man who would rather see his geodes opened at kitchen tables than sawed open and sold in a gift shop for $120 a pair.

Every order is checked and packed by hand, and every set carries a 90-day money-back guarantee. “If the first one doesn’t stop you when it opens, send the set back,” Merle says. “But in forty-one years nobody has ever mailed one of these back to me. Once it’s open in a person’s hand, they don’t want to let go of it.”

For anyone who understands the value of something that cannot be manufactured — and who wants to be the first person to see inside a 340-million-year-old stone before what is left is gone.