By Adrienne Perron
From our January 2022 issue
If someone had told Chase Morrill back when he was filming the pilot for Maine Cabin Masters that the show would one day shoot a 100th episode, he wouldn’t have believed it. Producers had warned Morrill and his handy crew of camp fixer-uppers — his sister, Ashley Morrill; her husband, Ryan Eldridge; and their friends Matt “Dixie” Dix and Jared “Jedi” Baker — that most pilots never get green-lit for a season, and of those that do, few make it to a second season.
Now, five years since the January 2017 premiere of season one, Maine Cabin Masters is in its seventh season. It’s been one of the highest-rated shows on the DIY Network (set to become the Magnolia Network this month). “We thought we would do one pilot and have fun stories to tell, but we weren’t looking for fame or fortune,” Morrill says. “We’d do this type of work with or without a film crew following us.” Although he concedes they sometimes employ unorthodox methods for the sake of good TV — using a boat to remove a cabin’s facade, for example.
The years have flown by for Morrill, who gauges the show’s longevity by how much his kids have grown since they appeared in the first season. One of his favorite memories from that season was when the power went out while rehabbing a cabin on Cobbosseecontee Lake’s Cuba Island. His kids had tagged along, and the family spent the afternoon playing in the water, soaking up a summer day. It epitomized life in Maine, Morrill says.
Still, his favorite place in the state is a wintery spot: atop Muleskinner, a double-black-diamond trail at Saddleback ski mountain. An Augusta native, Morrill learned to ski at Saddleback growing up (he went on to do a stint as a Colorado ski bum after college). Now, when he stands atop the ungroomed trail he used to bomb down as a kid, overlooking beautiful Rangeley Lake, he’s joined by his own children. “We’re all from Maine, and we’re not going anywhere,” Morrill says, about both his family and his Cabin Masters crew. “We are so proud of how the show has publicized our state and shown its beauty and why we live here.”
Headshot by Brewster Burns
