Assuming the party rests…
The journey up the alternate path is rough, through the barren jagged landscape, leaving the party with more then their share of bumps, scrapes, and bruises. But then the cave entrance comes into view, along with desiccated corpses littering the cave entrance.
A beast slumbers in the entrance way, or at least it looks to slumber from your hidden vantage point some 100 feet away from the entrance. It looks more like a yawning maw of jagged teeth, and the sky has a red haze to it in the late afternoon sky…
The area smells foul and of death.
The resting creature is twice as large as a wolf, and has red black scaly skin, from this distance it looks like a horrid demon dog!