When you walk around the landfill area in the Rūdninkai Forest Biosphere Reserve, it sometimes feels as if you are in a film about another planet: there is absolute silence, an eerie peacefulness, and a spreading wilderness. For anyone who wants an unusual way to spend a few hours at the weekend, a visit to the Rūdninkai Forest Biosphere Reserve and its most impressive places is a great choice. If you take the route shown below, you will be able to climb up Kuliamo Hill, walk over sand dunes that are not beside the sea, and admire the area around Lake Šulnis.
Rūdninkai Forest begins as soon as you leave the capital and go towards the south east. The continental dunes are one of the forest’s most unusual sites. The story of how these dunes appeared in the middle of the forest is rather grim: exposed sand dunes formed as a result of constant bombing and fires, because during Soviet times there was a training ground here for air force pilots. Local people say that in the 1980s a fighter plane crashed in the Rūdninkai landfill during an exercise, killing the pilot. After Lithuania regained its independence, bomb disposal experts worked for over ten years in the landfill to find and defuse all unexploded bombs. Now the area has been declared a geo-ecologically important site in Rūdninkai Forest Biosphere Reserve.
Even today, the shapes of craters formed by the bombs can still be seen in the landfill, and only heather, lichen and scrawny trees grow around them, as in dunes where nothing grows. Maybe knowing why they are here is the reason why the place makes such a strong impression on us, which lasts for a long time after we have visited it.
