We owe you, our subscribers, a big thank you for your patience last week when print issues of the Wallowa County Chieftain were delayed due to road closures between our print facility in Pendleton and Wallowa County.

You reminded us all, again, how important your paper is to you and its late delivery is a disruption. We heard from a lot of you last week, who called — Wednesday, Thursday and into Friday — to find out why your paper hadn’t arrived yet.

We lost track of how many calls we received, but we appreciate everyone who was patient and understanding.

We apologize that your paper was delivered late, but Mother Nature and the Oregon Department of Transportation had no sympathy for our need for news — and Safeway coupons — last week.

The printing facility our company owns is in Pendleton, in the building of our sister paper, the East Oregonian, which prints its own paper, The Chieftain, Blue Mountain Eagle, Hermiston Herald and Capital Press, and several other products for us, like the monthly real estate guide.

Usually, that is a good arrangement for all of our sister publications, except when road closures prevent those papers from getting out of Pendleton. Maybe we should have contacted some of the innovative mushers participating in the Eagle Cap Extreme, who managed to find ways to get around road closures to make it in time to race.

If — or perhaps when — that ever happens again, those of you who use smartphones and computers can still get access to the information we publish in the printed paper using our website, e-edition (which shows you electronic version of our print pages) and email newsletters. If you are a subscriber, you have the ability to activate your digital subscription free with your subscription. Some news and information is also available free to all users of our website.

We also use our Facebook page to share links to some of our stories each week and post other news, photos and announcements via the social media site.

For example, we also used Facebook last week to share information about a power outage that was affecting a large portion of Wallowa County. The outage was short, but with no power in our building we also could not use our computers and office Internet connection to post what we knew about the outage to our website (until the power came back on). However, we still had cell phone service, and could post updates to our Facebook page.

Today, the Wallowa County Chieftain, is more than a weekly newspaper. We have multiple products and ways to deliver news and information to Wallowa County, and the world beyond in print and digitally.

We realize that digital products, like Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and websites, are not for everyone. The printed paper is still the most important thing we do to us. We are proud and pleased that it is still important to so many of you, too. But as Mother Nature taught us last week, sometime we need other tools to keep doing what we do. We hope you will use those tool too, by signing up for our email newsletters, liking our Facebook page, activating your digital subscriptions to our website and even following us on Twitter so we can share news regardless of road conditions.

As for getting those coupons to you, we may need to work with our advertisers and digital experts to find a solution to that issue.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for advertising. And thank you for supporting the advertisers who support us and our community. And thank you for calling us last week to activate your digital subscriptions and telling us how important your newspaper is to you.

We heard you. Loud and clear.