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Flashes. Spinning overhead in America, Command Module Pilot Evans was making his own scientific observations. He spotted two mysterious flashes of light—one east of Mare Orientalis, the other near the great crater Eratosthenes—that could be hints of present-day volcanic venting. (Earlier, while still in lunar orbit, Schmitt also had seen a surface flash.) With the help of a Soviet photograph, Evans spotted a cluster of volcanic-looking domes on the moon's far side; other volcanic formations were spotted on the front side. Finally, America's highly sensitive infrared scanner detected from orbit a number of hot and cold spots on the moon's surface; some of them are as much as 15 miles across. Exclaimed Geology Tutor El Baz: "I really think we're getting our money's worth out of Ron."
On their third moon ride, Cernan and Schmitt headed toward North Massif, a high mountain on the north side of the valley. They poked and hammered at huge boulders that had rolled down from the massif eons ago. Gathering up almost every portable sample in sight, Schmitt said: "I feel like a kid playing in a sandbox." Later, as he began sideslipping in the powdery dust of the massif's slopes, Ski Buff Schmitt pretended that he was slaloming. "Whoosh! Whoosh! Wheeee!" he shouted. "Little hard to get good hip rotation." Examining one of the larger boulders, the astronauts spotted "dikelets"—veins of different material that have been injected into the rock after it has already cooled off and solidified. Such a marble-cake effect could reveal to scientists when different geological episodes took place on the moon.
Moving east, the astronauts made a stop near the Sculptured Hills, which they described as resembling "the wrinkled skin of an old, old man." The hills had apparently been thrust up by the same meteoric impact that created the Sea of Serenity, near the edge of the Taurus-Littrow site. The next stop, a crater called Van Serg, proved to be a disappointment. Scientists had hoped that Van Serg, too, might be of volcanic origin. But after 20 minutes of poking and digging at the site, the astronauts failed to find any more orange dirt. On close inspection, in fact, the crater displayed characteristics (blocky rim, central peak, rocks of fused fragments called breccias) that were distinctly nonvolcanic. Commented Geochemist Richard Williams in Houston: "That sounds like a classic description of an impact crater."