483 a
A frame from the panoramic sequence taken by Shepard at station C’ located 215 m east north east from station B3; and 1345 m east north east from the LM.

At this moment the astronauts abandoned their hunt for Cone Crater and visited this boulder field, which shows a 3-foot-high boulder at left, not realizing that the rim of Cone Crater was beyond the boulders on the near horizon in the center of image, only 90 m away to the northwest.

“We had to give up because of the tim constraint [...] for the last two hundred yards we thought, the next one is the edge of Cone Crater, and it was just another ridge. We assumed that the next one would be just another ridge also, and it turned out, no in this case, the next one really was the edge of Cone Crater,” said Edgar Mitchell (Chaikin, voices, p.95).

133:23:17 Shepard: Well, I don’t know what the rim is still way up here from the looks of things.
133:23:23 Haise (Mission Control): And, Ed and Al, we’ve already eaten in our 30-minute extension and we’re past that now. I think we’d better proceed with the sampling and continue with the EVA.
133:23:37 Mitchell: Okay, Fredo.
133:23:40 Shepard: Okay. We’ll start with a pan from here. I’ll take that.
133:23:47 Mitchell: All right, I’ll start sampling. (Long Pause)
133:24:26 Shepard: Okay, Houston. We are in the middle of a fairly large boulder field. It covers perhaps as much as a square mile. And, as the pan will show, I don’t believe we have quite reached the rim yet. However, we can’t be too far away and I think certainly we’ll find that these samples (come from) pretty far down in Cone Crater.

483 b
A frame from the panoramic sequence taken by Shepard at station C’ located 215 m east north east from station B3; 1345 m east north east from the LM; and about 90 m south east of the rim of Cone Crater.

The view is looking south across the valley which the crew overflew during the final approach to landing. Station C’ was approximately 80 m higher than the landing site. The LM is out of shot in the valley to the right.

The foreground shows the central portion of a fragment-rich crater that has been punched into the local Cone Crater ejecta.

“It was at this point that Shepard and Mitchell had used up their time allotted to find the rim of the crater and now had to turn around” (Constantine, p. 54).

“The one thing that was a surprise was, we couldn’t navigate like we thought we could, because the dunes were much higher. And you couldn’t see where you were. You’d lose the LM when you went down into a depression, and trying to navigate up to Cone Crater we had very precise points laid out to get to, and we never were sure whether we were near one of them or not [...] within ten yards of it or exactly on top of it. Or whether it was over in the next valley,” said Edgar Mitchell (Chaikin, Voices, p.94).

483 c
The white boulder known as Saddle Rock and located at Station C1, is on the local horizon, above and to the right of the split boulder beyond the gnomon in this photograph taken at the first sampling location at Station C-Prime. The gnomon and Mitchell’s shadow are in the foreground.

“We couldn’t actually look down into Cone Crater because there was a large rock barrier that prevented us from making it all the way up to the actual rim,” observed Edgar Mitchell (Constantine, p.54).

133:25:40 Shepard: All righty. Let me say, Houston, that most of these boulders are the same brownish gray that we’ve found. But we see one (Saddle Rock) that is definitely almost white in color. A very definite difference in color, which we’ll document. We noticed that beneath this dark brown regolith, there is a very light-brown layer. And I think we’ll get a core tube right here to show that. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll do that right now.

483 d
Shepard took this photograph to document the “spot (up-Sun of the gnomon nearest the camera) where he took a sample from a small secondary impact” (ALSJ caption for AS14-64-9127). MET tracks are also visible.

133:35:48 Shepard: Right now I’m sampling a layer that is sort of a light gray just under the regolith. That went in bag number 9; and bag number 10 was a sample of some of the surface rocks that were right around that area. It looks like kind of a secondary impact that has disrupted the surface regolith and gone on down into the gray area.