FRISCO • A couple exits the Moose Jaw, but not before thanking Mama Moose.

Lynda Colety rises to hug the man and woman as they go. “Oh, it was so great seeing you. Come here!”

Regulars, it would seem.

“Nah,” Colety says. “They just stopped by for the first time.”

So it goes at the Jaw, as the bar is simply known.

The 80-year-old founder treats strangers like old friends — like any of those smiling, laughing faces in the collages filling the walls.

They are the faces of five beer-soaked decades here. Faces that have come and gone, passing like the years.

But the Jaw remains.

“Here’s to another 50!” one says this afternoon, raising his glass.

“Oh, god!” remarks Colety, raising her wine right back.

For 50 years Mama Moose has been at the center of it all. The owner is still often found bellied up to the bar, quick to hug just as she is quick to joke and curse and down a shot with any and all.

They are tourists, locals and ski bums, youngsters back for winter who come here for a burger or bowl of chili and a $3 PBR. (Bottles are $2 for happy hour, a price unheard of here across Summit County and Colorado’s broader ski country.)

Colety is Mama. The nickname is fitting for the matriarch of this cave-like, largely unchanged nook from 1973.

“Your bar away from home,” Colety likes to call it.

In a proclamation from the last milestone decade, Frisco’s town government called the Moose Jaw a “landmark,” a place “fulfilling a necessary need to the community … a place where family and friends can gather … a place where no one is a stranger (we are all strange).”

Summit County is a strange mix of vacationers, seasonal workers, second homeowners and the occasional longtimer like Colety, who remembers days of dirt streets and more cowboys than skiers. Horse hitches were outside the Moose Jaw when she opened it. That was around the time Copper Mountain opened along with the Eisenhower Tunnel on Interstate 70.

Colety watched buildings sprout along Frisco’s main street, all around her bar, which was the transplanted bunkhouse for men who built the Dillon Reservoir dam in the late 1950s. It was all development preceding the scene we know today: the sunny, glitzy, apres scene that starkly contrasts the dark, low-slung Jaw.

“You just don’t find a place like this in Summit County anymore,” says Colety’s son, Sean, born and raised here through the ’80s and ’90s.

There are much older bars, like the Gold Pan Saloon in Breckenridge and the Mint in Silverthorne. Neither has maintained the same family ownership as the Jaw has.

Businesses come and go like the people, similarly determined by snow or the lack of it and an increasingly volatile real estate landscape. It was a sad reminder recently for decadeslong customers of Dillon’s Arapahoe Cafe and Pub.

The restaurant closed in October, citing landlords’ intent to sell amid redevelopment plans. Read the welcome sign during the business’s final week: “All good things must come to an end. Thanks for all the memories!”

Memories live on at the Moose Jaw. There was a big party in celebration of half a century.

“I can’t believe it’s been 50 years,” Colety says.

It all started with a love for Colorado — a young woman from South Dakota taken by the mountains and their odd people.

“The first time I came out was the early or mid-’60s, and we went to Aspen to ski,” Colety recalls. “That was the hippie days of Aspen. Dogs running crazy, and everybody was just free. … That was eye-opening, just that freedom and everybody’s attitude. It was like, anything goes.”

She had a husband and a life back in the Midwest. She had no ideas for a life beyond.

Then came a divorce. “Then my whole attitude on life had pretty much changed,” Colety says. “This is what you want to do, then you just have to go for it.”

Off she went to explore more of Colorado, not expecting Frisco to be where she’d settle; she knew it to be an “armpit” at the time. But she was somehow enchanted by that old, dam builder bunkhouse, which had been converted into a cafe. Something about it reminded Colety of the bar her dad had owned back home.

In she moved. On she went to host a cast of characters: cowboys, hippies, motorcycle gangs.

“It was hard keeping the peace a lot of times,” Sean Colety says.

It was harder than he might’ve known for his mother. “We were losing our shirts,” she says. “It was hand to mouth, hand to mouth.”

She noticed changes as Copper Mountain started making snow. More snow, more visitors.

The more the merrier, Colety thought. Maybe the attitudes would be different, the hippie days gone away, seemingly, in favor of money and luxury. But who was a Colorado outsider to resist more outsiders? “Look out the front door,” Colety says. “It’s just so beautiful.”

Other locals lamented the paving and the building and the tourist marketing, and maybe they needed to let go of nostalgia. Of course, it was nostalgia that made the Jaw an attraction as the years went by.

Maybe it’s no wonder a certain camera crew picked the bar not long ago. That’s the Jaw in the music video for “Tequila” by Dan + Shay — appearing like any bar anyone from anywhere can recognize.

That’s the thing about the Jaw, Sean says: “It’s one of the last places in Summit County where pretty much any tourist can say, ‘We’ve got one of these back in our hometown.’”

He’s not about to let it fade in his hometown.

Maybe they could sell the building. “I think that’s why it’s harder for people to hang on to stuff around here. The dollar signs are there,” Sean says.

But maybe the Moose Jaw is priceless. As Mama Moose ages, he’s promised to keep things going — to keep the bar just as it is.

Change is inevitable, and maybe that’s not so bad, Sean says. “But not inside,” he says, motioning to the door. “Outside.”