Thanks for your replies. Glad to hear that I'm not the only one who found this strange. The plane was an MD-80 and I overheard a FA say that it was either stop to refuel or leave 30 passengers behind, since the plane was completely full.

I still think we could have stopped somewhere else. There was good weather to about Ohio, and then the de-icing would not have been necessary. We knowingly flew into a snowstorm at ORD.

I'm going to check other flight arrivals for DEN yesterday, and I'll report back.