Good to hear you made it. Yup Goddard Creek is like preparing for children; no matter how much information you get from other who have been there, you cannot fathom what is in store for you
When I went down Goddard in 1989, it took 16 hours over 2 days. We stayed high on the western side trying to find a way down to the creek. We were repeatedly cliffed out and had to drop our packs and recon, then go back for the packs all of the way around the traverse of the first part of the ridge. Once we hit a large gully between two mts., we were able to work our way down to the creek. At the creek, we spent all day boulder hopping, each of us falling into the creek once. At one point, we used a large root to swing around a cliff over the creek to a boulder on the other side, Tarzan style. That's when I hit the drink. Many places were impassable in the creek bed, so we tried to scurry up the bank into the forest. The bank was so crumbly that it was nearly impossible to get up and onto terra firma. We probably did this half a dozen times. Each time, going through the forest, there were tons of wild bramble (I guess) vines with tons and tons of sharp needles. The vines literally swung out at us, grabbing onto our clothing and biting us right through to the skin. To make matters worse, my buddy was a bit on the dense side. Whenever he led, he would move a branch out of his way, then let it fly right into my face. I fired him as leader. We finally had to camp at a small wash on the bank. There was no place to hang our food bags (no cans at that time), so we used them as pillows to keep small critters away and prayed we would not have to deal with any bears during our sleep. Once we hit the forest below the fork of Disappearing creek and Goddard creek, the going actually got much better as there had been a fire there in the near past and much of the brush was gone. It was the wettest, nastiest two days I've ever spent in the Sierra.
The next day, we went over the Monarch divide, but we forgot to empty our water bottles and re-fill with water. Once we were well on the trail, we realized our water was actually whiskey and crystal light. Argh! We about died of thirst before we made it to the target stream for camp. We actually contemplated, a few times, dropping our packs and beat feeting it to the water source, then going back to our packs.
Sierra, 3 days of HE!! Kids, 15 years and they're still giving me HE!!
If you don't know where you're going, then any path will get you there.